Auto-feed HotaruCms to Twitter

[kmai]

So I have been on this Twitter kick lately, sorry. But, let’s face it, Twitter is where the action is. So let’s looks at how to have the built-in RSS feature work for you. Look Auto Feed step by step.

[baadier]

You could also accomplish this by burning your feed with feedburner and using the promote tab to set it to a twitter account. What ive done is all my popular posts get a #soccer #football hashtag and ive also burnt specific feeds from the tags of popular clubs and set it for Manchester United for example to have #manutd so the relevant people see the right stuff. The click through rate on the tag rss feeds is much better than the general rss

[apfind]

There is a mayor problem with both options. They miss certain top posts.

Here's what I think is happening. Due to the way these services work, they seem to be pulling only the latest posts, not changes in the feed.

Here's an example:
Lets say users bookmarked one story on Monday and one on Tuesday. Imagine that the one from Tuesday gets voted on and makes top posts. Feedburner or Twitter Feed reads the RSS and automatically posts to twitter. No issue there. But here's the problem. The next day the story from monday also gets enough votes to make the top posts. But, because it was technically created at a earlier date, it shows up lower on the RSS timeline. And, that means Feedburner or Twitter feed don't post it all. It's invisible to them.

[baadier]

That's an interesting argument I might be mistaken though,even if a post is created on a previous date it still gets posted from what I've seen.I've manually moved posts that got traffic to the popular section and once there it automatically posted to twitter. I'm not sure if it works if posts get to popular "naturally" but I see no reason why it shouldnt

[apfind]

[PHP]Thanks Baadier. Hmmmm. I wonder what my issue is then. I keep getting lost posts. I ping a million times and feedburner still ignores them. I'll keep looking into it.

For those looking to develop a solution within Hotaru CMS...

Here is the PHP code to update your status on Twitter. I'm thinking that maybe this could be placed somewhere around line 75 in vote_functions.php (found within the vote plugin)
On line 75 in vote_function.php you find - " if ($vote_rating > 0) { // Change the status to 'top' if we have enough votes and are within the time limit to hit the front page: "

We might be able to insert the code below there, and use some of the code from the Tweet This Plugin to define the $message variable. We can also use some of the Tweet This code to URL shorten automatically.

PHP code to update your status on Twitter:

$username = 'myUser';
$password = '**********';
$format = 'xml'; //alternative: json 
$message = 'David Walsh\'s blog rocks! [url]http://davidwalsh.name/';[/url]
 
/* work */ 
$result = shell_exec('curl http://twitter.com/statuses/update.'.$format.' -u '.$username.':'.$password.' -d status="'.str_replace('"','\"',$message).'"'); 

Here is the Tweet_This.php code. We will probably have to fix some of the variables so that they no longer are taken from Tweet_This_Settings.php, but this is a good starting point...

In Tweet_This.php this PHP code builds the link:

/**
     * Build the link 
     */
    public function tweetThisPost($h)
    {
        // get the post's id from the url
        $post_id = $h->cage->get->testInt('id');
        
        // get the compressed url for this link
        $shortened_url = $this->getShortUrl($h, $post_id);
        
        // add the compressed link to the Twitter status update url
        $twitter_url = $this->getTwitterUrl($h, $post_id, $shortened_url); 

        // redirect to Twitter
        header("Location: " . $twitter_url);
        exit;
    } 

And, this code builds the shortened link:

    /**
     * Build the shortened link 
     *
     * @param int $post_id
     * @return string $url
     */
    public function getShortUrl($h, $post_id)
    {
        // Check the database to see if there's already a short link there.
        $query = "SELECT postmeta_value FROM " . TABLE_POSTMETA . " where postmeta_postid = %d AND postmeta_key = %s";
        $sql = $h->db->prepare($query, $post_id, 'compressed_url');
        $stored_short_link = $h->db->get_var($sql);
        
        if(!$stored_short_link) {
            // no short link in db. We need to create one:
            
            // get the post's url and encode it:
            $post_url = urlencode($h->url(array('page'=>$post_id)));
            
            // get settings so we know which shortener to use:
            $tweet_this_settings = $h->getSerializedSettings();

            // get the post's url and encode it:
           if ($tweet_this_settings['tt_use_GA_tracking']) // do we want GA tracking tags?
           {
                if (FRIENDLY_URLS == "false")    {
                    // friendly URLs are not enabled (add more query string parameters)
                    $post_url = urlencode($h->url(array('page'=>$post_id)) . '&utm_source=tweet-this&utm_medium=Twitter&utm_campaign=story-promotion' );
                }
                else 
                {   // friendly URLs are enabled (start with query string parameters)
                    $post_url = urlencode($h->url(array('page'=>$post_id)) . '?utm_source=tweet-this&utm_medium=Twitter&utm_campaign=story-promotion' );
                } 
            }
            else 
            {   
                // just send the URL without tracking tags
                $post_url = urlencode($h->url(array('page'=>$post_id)));
            }
            
            // which shortener do we use?
            switch($tweet_this_settings['tt_shortener']) {
                case 'tinyurl':
                    $url = file_get_contents('http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=' . $post_url);
                    break;
                case 'bitly':
                    $url = $this->getBitlyLink($h, $post_url, $tweet_this_settings);
                    break;
                default:
                    $url = file_get_contents('http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=' . $post_url);
            }

            // then store it in the database:
            $query = "INSERT INTO " . TABLE_POSTMETA . " (postmeta_postid, postmeta_key, postmeta_value, postmeta_updateby) VALUES(%d, %s, %s, %d)";
            $sql = $h->db->prepare($query, $post_id, 'compressed_url', urlencode(trim($url)), $h->currentUser->id);
            $h->db->query($sql);

        } else {
            // we can use the existing one.
            $url = $stored_short_link;
        }
        return trim($url);
    } 

This code builds the Twitter Status Update and inserts the shortened link from above...

    /**
     * Build the Twitter status update link
     *
     * @param int $post_id
     * @param string $shortened_url
     * @return string $url
     */
    public function getTwitterUrl($h, $post_id, $shortened_url)
    {
        $h->readPost($post_id);
        $title = html_entity_decode($h->post->title, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
        
        $orig_length = strlen($title); // get original title length
        if ($orig_length > 110) {
            $title = substr($title, 0, 100); // keep only the first 100 characters
            $title = substr($title, 0, strrpos($title,' ')); // keep everything up to the last space
            $title .= "..."; // adds some dots to show we've truncated it
        }
        $title = $title . " "; // 100 chars + "..." + " " = 104 chars, leaving 36 chars for the url
        $title = urlencode($title);
        
        // The final Twitter URL:
        $url = 'http://twitter.com/home/?status=' . $title . '+' . $shortened_url ;
        return $url;
    }
} 

[baadier]

Are you maybe adding posts in batches? I know with feedburner you can post up to 8 tweets for every feed batch. I'm not sure what happens if you for instance make 10 posts popular in 1 go. Does the extra 2 get tweeted later or is it just "lost"

[apfind]

That's a good watch out. I think I have had that happen in the past. But in this case it was just one lonely post that got lost.

[baadier]

I think keep in mind the limits when you change the status on posts cause when it happens naturally you won't have 20 posts go popular at once. Make sure the hashtags appended are relevant, and don't stress about the 10-15 minute delay before the posts get tweeted it will get there.