I'd like to include a section on my daily blog post that could capture/aggregate my activity from twitter, github, etc on that day. Ideally this information could be displayed in a visually unobtrusive manner at the bottom of the regular blog post.

I can add this information through an rss reader display (e.g. I'm running a wordpress site, and can use embed-rss plugin to display the latest information from a twitter or github rss), but this does not let me limit the date range to activity from that day; instead always showing the latest activity. So, questions:

  1. Is there a simple way to embed rss feed filtered to a certain date range on a post?
  2. Does the RSS feed provide a stable list of all the history, or will I need to create static snapshots of this instead?

  3. Can be done through the twitter and github APIs if not through a simple rss feed? Is there any app that already does this?

  4. Other suggestions to approach this kind of thing?

For instance, I can do something similar for my flickr activity using the flickr-gallery plugin's search feature, which gives me a scrollable set of thumbnails of photos matching certain search criteria in which I can set a date range to match that day.


I've never pulled activity data out of Github, so the below only applies directly to Twitter. I would imagine a lot of it is more or less the same for Github, though.

  1. I wouldn't rely on RSS for anything from Twitter. They've been killing it off ever since they started previewing NewTwitter. I actually think it's entirely gone now except for a few places where you can still hack URLs if you know what the old patterns were, so I'm surprised you're even posing the question this way.
  2. No. I can't even find a feed for account statuses right now, but I doubt they ever returned more than maybe 15 items. Beyond that, Twitter currently limits access to historical data to 3200 updates; if you have more than that, you just plain can't get at them by any method at the moment. This is "being worked on" but is clearly not anything like a priority. So yeah, you need to come up with a way to stash your own copies, if this "day in Twitter" block is something that needs to be persistent per-post.
  3. There are plenty of widgets for embedding Twitter information, for just about any given language, but I don't think I've seen one that lets you filter by date, probably because it doesn't make much sense to even try most times. Twitter is fundamentally focused on "now" and so are the great majority of tools built around it.
  4. My initial instinct would be to see if it'd be possible to use ThinkUp for this. In theory, you'd use it to create a personal archive of your updates and then be able to pull that data out however you want via its API.
  • Thanks for the reply. Yes, seems like api-based solution over an rss one is the way to go; I was surprised that I couldn't find a twitter widget that allowed a date filter -- seems that is available in the twitter-search API already (so no need for thinkup?) -- wondering if someone else has implemented that in an embeddable widget. (e.g. snapbird-like ability in widget/plugin form) – cboettig Dec 4 '11 at 21:30
  • Unless something's changed I'm unaware of, Twitter's search function can only look back seven days, and that's another thing they're in no apparent rush to increase. – Su' Dec 4 '11 at 23:49
  • Ah, good to know. Thanks, I'll see what I can set up with the think-up API. Likewise will play around with the github api for pulling in commits within a certain timeframe. – cboettig Dec 5 '11 at 16:40

Your Answer

