Getting dlvr.it to work with Pelican generated website

Thu 28 June 2018 by Dr. Dirk Colbry

Back when I worked for iCER I had my blog set up to automatically Tweet when I posted something new using a service called Twitter Feed. Unfortunately, Twitter Feed is no longer around and their website recommended dlvr.it as an alternative.

So far it was fairly strait forward to set up an account and I followed the menus to connect my Pelican RSS feed to my Titter account. At first it didn't seem to do anything but then I noticed a message that said something like "Last checked 56 seconds ago" and I went back to my Twitter account and all of my blog posts had been tweeted. Which is what I wanted so Yeah!

However, there were a lot of options that I didn't understand. For example, I thought it would only tweet the latest blog post. It didn't, it tweeted them all. Which is fine, this is where I wanted to go but I was hoping to test it first before blasting all of my twitter followers (I do not think I have many).

The second problem was that it only tweeted the title and the URL which is not very detailed. I don't want to everyone to be required to go to my blog post. I found an option to also include the body of the post. We will see if that does anything.

I plan to use this post as a test.

Dirk

Update 1: There was a setting in dlvr.it that I turned on to "Post Body". This let more come though the twitter feed and nicely includes an image. This makes the behavior act as expected so I am really excited. Oddly, this particular post is not seen on Twitter. This is because I went over the 10 post limit on dlvr.it. I am going to change the post date to today and see if that helps things out.

Update 2: Changing the date in the post didn't seem to trigger dlvr.it to post this message on twitter. I am now changing the filename inside of pelican to see if that changes the RSS feed enough to make dlvr.it think this is a new post.

Update 3: Changing the pelican filename didn't do anything either. I looked though the RSS feed and now I think maybe changing the post title will make a difference.


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