Jane’s list of “100+ (E-)Learning Professionals to follow on Twitter” (which includes yours truly, Martin and Grainne from the OpenU :-) has been doing the rounds today, so in partial response to Tony Karrer asking “is there an equivalent to OPML import for twitter for those of us who don’t want to go through the list and add people one at a time?”, I took an alternative route to achieving a similar effect (tracking those 100+ e-learning professionals’ tweets) and put together a Yahoo pipe to produce an aggregated feed – Jane’s edutwitterers pipe…
Scrape the page and create a semblance of a feed of the edutwitterers:
Tidy the feed up a bit and make sure we only include items that link to valid twitter RSS feed URLs (note that the title could do with a little more tidying up…) – the regular expression for the link creates the feed URL for each edutwitterer:
Replace each item in the edutwitterers feed with the tweets from that person:
From the pipe, subscribe to the aggregated edutwitters’ feed.
Note, however, that the aggregated feed is a bit slow – it takes time to pull out tweets for each edutwitterer, and there is the potential for feeds being cached all over the place (by Yahoo pipes, by your browser, or whatever you happen to view the pipes output feed etc. etc.)
A more efficient route might be to produce an OPML feed containing links to each edutwitterer’s RSS feed, and then view this as a stream in a Grazr widget.
Creating the OPML file is left as an exercise for the reader (!) – if you do create one, please post a link as a comment or trackback… ;-) Here are three ways I can think of for creating such a file:
- add the feed URL for each edutwitter as a separate feed in an Grazr reading list (How to create a Grazr (OPML) reading list). If you don’t like/trust Grazr, try OPML Manager;
- build a screenscraper to scrape the usernames and then create an output OPML file automatically;
- view source of Jane’s orginal edutwitterers page, cut out the table that lists the edutwitterers, paste the text into a text editor and work some regular ecpression ’search and replace’ magic; (if you do this, how about posting your recipe/regular expressions somewhere?!;-)
Enough – time to start reading Presentation Zen…
