New Feature – Twitter Updates!!

It took me weeks of thinking, but I’ve worked it out.

From today onwards, my @onlinefiction twitter account will be publicising new episodes, chapters and stories on sites which it is already publicising.

If you’re the owner of one of these sites/serials, keep reading before you get too excited!

There are a couple of provisos on this free – note, free, so no complaining! – service.

1. Your site must offer an RSS feed.
2. I must know about the RSS feed, or it must be easily findable on your site.
3. DON’T expect me to manually include updates which you tweet or email me about, or add to comments. That’s far too much work. I may occasionally include things manually out of the goodness of my heart. My choice.

If your site meets those conditions, then chances are that the feed is already included in my wonderful new (and hopefully not inherently stuffed) Yahoo pipe thingy which has aggregated everyone’s RSS feed into one stream of new article titles in my feed reader. I use this stream of titles to produce a list of updates made in the last 48 hours, create tweets, stick them in a text file, and upload it to TweetLater to be auto-tweeted.

So, in theory, @onlinefiction will be tweeting about updated serial and short fiction each day, and the content of those tweets will change every couple of days.

Actuality may be a little different.

If anyone’s feed producer is lagging, I might not get information about an update until it’s ‘old’ and it may pass straight under my radar.

If I’ve set this Yahoo pipe up incorrectly, the whole thing could go belly-up.

If I get sick, or busy, updates may cease for a while – because while I’ve organised it to be as automated as is humanly sensible, there’s still 15-20 minutes work per day in it.

In other words, don’t expect anything too wonderful and whizz-bang, OK? Because this is being run by the same green-haired ditz who still has a backlog of sites to include in the listings, and still needs to add those listings to this blog, among other things. This new initiative is bound to have its imperfections.