Some Essential Twitter Tools

Looks like Twitter is very simple and easy tool, how to effectively use it? If you’re using Twitter for personal, corporate use, or to manage the brand of a client, you’ll need the right tools to find and engage the discussions.

These are some essential Twitter tools to improve the experience. Not all, but something I am using now, share with you:

1. Client: Using the web to fresh it manually is really boring. Twhirl is the most popular client, using adobe air technology. Leave it on your desktop and the client may be more accurate in seeing who’s replying to you, unlike the browser version. I highly recommand it. Another recommended client are the add-ons for Firefox if you are using it. You can find them in "Get Add-ons", the TwitterFox is a good choice.

2. Search: Use Tweetscan or Twitter Search to search tweets. You will feel the world is not too bad. If you use Twhirl as your client, you can find both of them have ben integrated into the search panel.

3. Aggregation: FriendFeed puts all of our RSS content onto one page, making it easy to see from one glance (rather than going to different web sites) and you can even reply from FriendFeed to different tools. It’s smarter to organize around people, rather than tools. I use it to feed my Google Blogger, Google Picasa Web Albums, WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter to same page, awesome!

4. Image Upload: Can we post image to Twitter? Yes, use Twitpic to store and share photos on Twitter. I didn't test the exact limit size, but too big file cause failure. I tried 3 ways to post image:
a. Upload photo in Twitpic web site, and copy the shorten link to Twitter;
b. Use the client Twhirl to upload image, the image will be stored in Twitpic, a link will be added to the Twitter status;
c. Use Firefox add-on "Power Twitter" to post photo, the result is same as Twhirl.
In the Twitter timeline home page, the image can only be displayed when Add-on "Power Twitter" is enabled, otherwise user have to click the shorten link to open picture in Twitpic site.

More to be added ...

Automatically feed Blogger to Twitter by twitterfeed.com

What a great service! I love it!

When I have both of the Blogger and Twitter, I want to use Twitter as a window to inform my friends about my blog update. But if I have to manually send tweet to Twitter, that's time waste. As what I like to do for development, it's perfect if I can make it automated. Although Twitter has its own API for developer, but looks like the ScribeFire still can not support posting to it. How?

Before my giving up finally, I found this service: http://twitterfeed.com/. My God! It's free, and looks like it can help to automatically feed tweet to Twitter from any type of blog, and generate a shorten link to your blog entry, so nice!

Very easy:
1. Login to twitterfeed.com using your OpenID (dont say you dont know what is OpenID if you really use blog frequently)

2. Create a new feed, input all required information: (note: the RSS Feed URL of your blog is the most important input, for Blogger you can see the RSS URL format here)


3. Enjoy it! Now all the blog new entries will be automatically fed to my Twitter every 30 minutes (of course with the characters number limit) and a shorten link.

My blog entry flow chart:

Use ScribeFire to post entry to Blogger

Yesterday, I successfully configure the ScribeFire to easily post entry to Google Blogger, let me share the steps using Blogger as an example: (actually I also use it for WordPress now)

Follow me:
Step 1. You should have a blog site in Blogger first (http://www.blogger.com)


Step 2. Download and install the Firefox add-on ScribeFire


After the installation, you should be able to find an icon at the right hand of the browser status bar like this:

Step 3. Click the ScribeFire icon to open the application. You can configure it to be open in new tab, or in new window, or in split-screen.

Step 4. Click the "Launch Account Wizard" button to set up your account for Blogger:
a. Enter your blog's URL like this: http://yourname.blogspot.com/, click Next;
b. The Account Wizard should be able to automatically get the proper configuration for your Blogger in next window, click Next; (note: this is the most important step for the configuration, if you attempt to configure ScribeFire for any other Blog service, you must find a proper blog system type and the blog service API URL values)
If the wizard can not detect the proper configuration for you, please input them by yourself:
>> select Blogger as blog system type;
>> input API URL like this format: http://www.blogger.com/feeds/yourblogId/posts/default, and you can find your blogId value in the browser address bar when you enter your Blogger setting page. To find the address looks like: http://www.blogger.com/blog-options-basic.g?blogID=20398450394850394. Have you see it?
c. Input your Blogger username and password for authentication purpose, click Next;
d. If everything is OK, the wizard should be able to retrieve all the blog sites under your Blogger account, select one of them for future posting, click Next;
e. Click Finish, a new account should be listed in the ScribeFire Blogs tab.

Step 5. Go! Select the account by radio button (note: clicking on the account name trigger to open your blog), write a new entry in ScribeFire, and click Publish to "your account title" button. For new entry, publish as a new post; for existing entry update, publish as an edit of the original entry.


Step 6. Wish you luck!:) Enjoy the great tool! You can use this offline editor tool to easily post your entry to your several blogs as you want.