It seems twitter is caching their RSS feeds for hours, kind of making them meaningless. I have a script that check for updates on my feed every 20 minutes and posts it to haruska.com if updated. Three hours after a tweet, and it still hasn’t updated. I filed a bug, but no response.

The fix is just to screen scrape your feed instead of RSS. This has the effect of increasing server load on Twitter and complicating the users scripts. Don’t companies think this stuff through? That was one of the points of an RSS feed.

Ah, well… I’ll update my script and post it sometime tonight.

I can’t rave enough about tumblr. It is a great idea executed well by a small dev team. I wanted my twitter updates to happen more frequently then their feed updates allow. I also wanted it to be formatted differently.

So, I wrote a quick ruby script that grabs a twitter feed and updates tumblr with it. It changes the text to be “status: …” instead of starting with your username. It also links back to the original tweet.

Add your username and password, stick it in your crontab and you should be good to go. You can see the results on my tumble log