Show your Twitter Feed on your Website with MyRealPage

Twitter is a great tool to create and maintain large social networks. If you, like many others, have "discovered" Twitter and it became part of your daily online life, you may be interested in connecting your Twitter Feed to your website with MyRealPage.

There are a number of "widgets" which can be found on Widgetbox (http://www.widgetbox.com) that show your latest posts from your Twitter Feed. These widgets can be easily incorporated into your MyRealPage website by simply copying and pasting a code snippet.

Below is a video which demonstrates just how to do that. In the end, we will achieve the effect shown in the screenshot below:

Watch this video to see how to achieve this effect:

Hint: MyRealPage also provides a "News Weblet" which can read any RSS Feed (Quick Primer on RSS here) and display results (including randomizing them) on any of your pages. Well... Twitter gives you an RSS Feed which you can easily find on your home Twitter page. Why not try and experiment by connecting your Twitter RSS feed to MyRealPage News Weblet and see your latest tweets in their full glory on your webpage. If you would like a separate HOWTO on how to achieve this, vote on this blog by posting a comment!

Publish your MyRealPage Blogs to Twitter

Twitter is a great tool to create and maintain large social networks. If you, like many others, have "discovered" Twitter and incorporated it into your daily online activity, you may want to see how much closer you can bring Twitter to your MyRealPage website.

This post will explore publishing updates in your blog on a MyRealPage website to your Twitter account.

Twitter allows you to publish up-to-140-character-long messages that describe "what you are doing". Wouldn't it be great, if you could use Twitter to automatically announce that you have published a new blog posting. Or even better: since MyRealPage provides you with automated blog postings for your listing activity, such as New Listings, Sold Listings and Open Houses; wouldn't it be great if those posts could also make their way into your Twitter stream. That's precisely what you can achieve by connecting your blog feed to your Twitter account.

To connect your blog RSS feed (read a short primer on RSS and feeds here) to your Twitter account, use a great free service provided by TwitterFeed (http://www.twitterfeed.com):

1. Create a TwitterFeed account. You can create a new account or use your GMail username/password to login (don't worry, twitterfeed will not know your password, it will use an OpenID protocol which Google participates in. In fact, we highly recommend that you create a GMail account, as it gives you access to a whole bunch of other Google services which you can find very useful).
2. Go to your website's Blog page and locate the RSS Feed icon. Right-click on on it, and select "Copy Shortcut":
   
3. In TwitterFeed, create a New Feed and populate the fields. This is what my screen looked like after it was filled out:
   
   
   
   
4. If you choose to update every 30 mins, then you may want to grab a cup of coffee until TwitterFeed runs your first update. After about 30 mins, you should see something like this show up in your Twitter account (provided, of course, you have some content in your Blog):
   
   
   

A couple of hints are in order here:

• If you find that your automatic listing blogs don't produce a well reading entry in Twitter, you can customize your Automation blog settings for your listings so that they produce most of the information in the first 140 characters and the posts become meaningful in Twitter. To customize your Automation templates, go to "Blogging->Automation" and click on appropriate "Edit Template" link next to New Listings, Sold Listings, and Open Houses.
  
• You can choose to use "Prefix each tweet with" field by entering something like "New Blog post:" to make your regular blog posts more meaning too. Experiment!
  

FeedBurner: Supercharge your Blog!

If you are serious about blogging (and you should be), you should consider using FeedBurner. FeedBurner is a special blog-enhancing service which is available for free from http://www.feedburner.com. It is designed to promote and enhance your blog and provide you with accurate statistics about your blog subscribers.

The video included in this blog will introduce you to how to "hook up" your MyRealPage blog to the FeedBurner and will explore a few useful features provided by FeedBurner, such as:

• PingShot
  
• Email Subscription
  
• Feed Integration with MyRealPage
  

Feedburner's PingShot will scan your blog for updates and "ping" well known blog aggregators about changes in your blog. It's a great way to tell the world that you have news.

Email Subscription form is a useful tool which can be easily embedded anywhere you like on a blog page in your MyRealPage website. It will notify your web visitors about updates in your blog.

Lastly, in order to allow FeedBurner to collect and report accurate statistics about your subscribers, MyRealPage can be instructed to redirect all subscription requests to FeedBurner. This feature is explored in the last section of the video.

These are, by no means, all the features provided by the FeedBurner. Invest some time and learn what it offers (hint: take a look at embedding "Publicize->Chicklets", "Optimize->FeedFlare"). Start slow and experiment! 

A hint: to embed various widgets from FeedBurner, use the example of Email Subscription from the video; i.e. use the "Html Markup" weblet: it's the easiest way to paste a code snippet into your web page.

RSS, Atom, Feeds: A Quick Primer

In the course of your online adventures, you may have already come across such terms, as "RSS", "Atom", "Syndication Feed", and others similar. You may have wondered what they meant and why you needed to care about them. The explanations for these terms are freely available on the web and are easy to find. I have put together this quick primer to skip over the technical details, but instead to try to convey to a non-too-tech savvy user what sort of technology these terms stand for and why they are important in today's web. I have also wanted to do this to "soften" some ground for the next few HOW-TO installments in this blog, as most of them will deal with RSS in some form or another.

For a regular user, the differences between RSS and Atom are not important. What's important is that both are standards regarding how to format a "List of Items". The format says how to describe the "List" itself, and then each "Item". This formatted List then can be accessed through a URL, usually by clicking on that well-recognizable symbol (and very much like any regular web page).

The "List" information, among many other things, should contain:

• Title
  
• URL of the website where the List originates
  
• Published Date
  
• Author

Each "Item" information, among other things, should contain:

• Title
  
• Description (can include images, video, etc)
  
• URL of the website where the Item can be found
  
• Published Date
  

Pretty simple, isn't it? Ok, let's try to see how many different types of information these formats can easily describe.

1. Can they describe blogs? Sure, and that's what they are used for a lot! Each blog posting ("Item") can be easily described through a Title, Description, URL, and Date. The blog itself ("List") can be also described through a Title, URL and Date. (In case you are wondering, your MyRealPage Blogs automatically get RSS feeds).

2. How about your Property Listings? Yes, actually. Your listings are obviously a "List" (even if there is only one or no listings). Each listing can also be easily described through a Title (say, listing's addess), Description (listing's details), URL (where to find the full web page on the listing).

3. How about your Testimonials? Hm, yes, indeed. You can easily apply the logic from the listing to describe a Testimonial: a Title can be the happy customer's name, Description can the content of the Testimonial, and the URL can be either skipped or point to your Testimonials page on your website.

4. So, how about, favorite quotes, cooking recipes, useful links, reports? Yes, and you should get the picture by now.

So, the next question is why should you care about all this?

Well, simply put, both RSS and Atom are a great way to read and stay up to date with changes in a particular "List". Most modern browsers will allow you to access an RSS or Atom feed directly and display well formatted results too! Every time you refresh, you get the updated list. Browsers find it easy to read these feeds because they "understand" the format, for example, they know where each "Item" begins, where each "Description" is, etc.

Then, enter Feed (RSS) Readers... These allow you to organize all your favorite feeds in one place, much alike favorite links in your browser, and the Feed (RSS) Reader will update all of them when you click to see new updates.

If you are interested, I strongly encourage you to check out Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader). It will display all your feeds in a web page, and I even use it on my phone. If you already have a gmail account, you can start using it right away. If not, create a google account; it's very quick and simple. Google Reader is a great way to start experimenting with feeds or to organize your existing ones. (As an exercise, try to add this blog to your new Google Reader account, if you don't have one yet).

Stay tuned to the next few installments on this blog, as well as MyRealPage Company Blog http://www.myrealpage.com/blog.html too. They will be exploring the RSS in a traditional, and not so tranditional way.