It’s been a rough morning. Work had issues and I spent the day trying to figure out how to combine multiple Twitter RSS feeds into one long stream for another blog I’m working on. Yahoo has a nice looking GUI application called Pipes that you should check out as long as you have no interest in using Twitter RSS feeds. For some reason, Pipes has a rough time retrieving them.

I found two other sites that allow you to do this. One is RSS Mix, and the other is Feed Combine over in the UK. Now, what’s the URL for Twitter feeds? That gets tricky, but there are two URLs you can check out. The two possible formulas are:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/<TWITTER USER NAME>.rss

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=<TWITTER USER NAME>

If you’re confused, here is an example of the first and second, respectively, using the Black Library Twitter user. I’m pretty thankful for the guides and how to pages out there that helped me to figure it all out. It’s frustrating, but really gratifying when you figure out how to take greater control over your creations, both technically and artistically. It’s all too easy to accept the easy route of doing things, like just following templates or buying into the easy-to-use stuff and relinquishing control. But not Harry Patridge here… (NSFW.)