The Independent Blog

Posted by The Independent on January 10th, 2008 in General News, Website

How about that Surprise!Snow out there this morning? Last I checked, my weather updates said 20% chance of the white stuff. Turned out to be a 20% chance, 80% big fat lie.

But I didn’t come here to whinge about the snow that fell *just* after the last few batches had melted enough to make the roads passable again. I came to talk about a new function of The Independent’s Twitter feed.  I know I’ve talked about it before, but I added some cool functionality to it yesterday that is pretty spiff.

When I started the Twitter feed for the paper, I would manually enter news updates whenever I saw that a reporter had added one to the front page of the site. This was ok, but not very practical or timely, especially for breaking news. I might be busy producing the news cast or off at lunch or something.

So I heard about a nifty little program/plugin/whatever called twitterfeed that let’s you pop in your blog’s XML files and post them automagically to Twitter. SWEET! A bit of fiddling later, and ta da! It’s done.

Right now, I’ve got our Twitter feed set to post some local news when they publish the site each night, and our new updates throughout the day will still post to the web, but now they will also post to Twitter as well. No delay, and best of all, now manual labor on my part

If you have no idea what Twitter is, take a few minutes and read up on it. Then sign up (It’s free to join) and start following The Independent. Get your local news and updates on your time - on your cell phone, on the web or in your favorite newsreader.