New tool: TwitBlog for LiveBlogging with Twitter

Let's say you want to live-blog something. Let's say you like Twitter. Twitter is great for immediacy, but what if you want to round up all your tweets at the end of the day and put them in a blog post? You'd have to copy each one, reformat it, then put the whole list in chronological order.

Now you don't have to.

...

Production notes:

I put this little app together yesterday after thinking about it a lot longer. It's a simple Django-powered tool that converts a feed from Twitter Search into plain text or HTML ready to be pasted into a blog post. It uses Mark Pilgrim's excellent Python Universal Feedparser and Django's form processing library. The Twitter Search API does most of the heavy lifting.

Here's how it works:

1. Go to Twitter Search and enter a query. It'll probably work best, for this app, if you use the Advanced Search. For best results, include a start time and choose which users and/or hashtags(#) to follow. Try a few queries until you get the results you like.
2. Click on the "Feed for this query" link in the upper right-hand corner.
3. Copy the resulting URL into the form. Choose order and format options.
4. You should get a block of text you can paste into a blog post.

This is an early beta. Let me know how I can improve it.

Update: Got some link love and feedback from Kevin at How I Work Daily, suggesting I add an option to render the results in a text box for easy copying. Done. Let me know how that handles.

Before: Stuff to learn in 2009 | After: Remembering Deep Throat and the man in the shadows