Subscribe to your Twitter feed

I've wanted to have a look at the Twitter API ever since the untimely demise of twitter-atom.appspot.com. This is still a great service from @Ryan Barrett but unfortunately it's no longer possible to sign up thanks to Twitter developer account changes.

When I was working on i.haza.website I was hoping to make that part of the platform, so I've had a go at my own instead. What I ended up with was a Twitter home timeline to h-feed converter that I could drop in as a replacement. I needed a hub that can sign up as a Twitter app, and then produce feeds for each authorized user, so I set that up using my reader at unicyclic.com. You can sign in there with a regular account or via IndieAuth, and if you authorize your Twitter account it will create a feed for you.

The other way it works is via Microsub on your own website. That's how I'm using it now, so authorizing my Twitter account from my reader on my own site subscribes me to my Twitter timeline. This works because my site was configured to use unicyclic.com as a Microsub server when it was created on i.haza.website. (You can use it as a server from your own site too!) That's getting pretty jargony so here's some pictures of how it works:



Either from your own website or via an account on unicyclic.com, there are some new options under Manage Feeds. Clicking the Authorize button will take you to Twitter.



Twitter shows you what Unicyclic has access to, at the moment it's just reading your home timeline. Having access to the Twitter API in the reader does allow for some interesting new features though, for instance I would like to be able to follow people who are retweeted from inside my reader.



Once you authorize the app, the callback takes you to unicyclic.com. You don't need to be logged in, there's enough information provided to add the feed to your account. If you started the process from your own website it offers to take you back there.



Once back at your reader you should see the new feed subscription. It won't have a channel set, I usually have the default set to 'silos' because I don't check it that often. My favourite part of the reader is being able to set the channel per author. It's like creating Twitter lists from your own website, except you can mix them in with other feeds if you want.



Authors have hovercards in the reader which lets you change the channel. At the end of the day it all pretty much works the same as before! I'm not sure if this app will be allowed to exist forever, so it is a case of use at your own risk. (I will also be holding on to my old API key for twitter-atom.appspot.com just in case.)
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