post rss to Twitter with a custom URL shortener

I’ve been doing some experimenting and I believe I’ve figured how to do this with tools already out there (without building your own solution and hosting it). All you need is an RSS feed, a domain you control and a twitter account.

  1. Start with logging in to bitly.com with your twitter (or create a new account)
  2. Setup your custom domain (this is where you need access to your DNS records)
  3. Get your API login and API password here, you’ll need these later.
  4. Log in to twitterfeed.com, I used my Blogger openID.
  5. Create a new feed using the rss URL of your choice. I used my Blogger blog.
  6. In the advanced settings, setup bitly as your shortener and use the API credentials.
  7. Done

Then you write a blog post about how you did it and see if it worked. The one thing I don’t like is when you have twitter connected to Facebook, your custom link gets converted to a t.co address. They must do it for safety, but it still sucks. Brand is important.

Update: Only issue I find is that the root of your domain gets taken over by bitly; you have to pay them a little less than 1000$ per month to get the ability to redirect it.

Update 2: Forget everything I said and use yourls