As long as I’ve been using Twitter, I’ve been using FeedWordPress and an @-stripping Yahoo Pipe to post my tweets on this blog. The Yahoo Pipe I used stopped working over the weekend though, so I set out to replace the Pipe: first with a shell script (thanks to @kjhealy), but then I stumbled upon the fact that PHP 5 includes SimpleXML, an extension that lets you easily manipulate XML with PHP. It’s very cool, and very easy to use. So easy, in fact, I only had to get to the second page of a tutorial before I realized I could quickly replace the dead Yahoo Pipe and even add a few more features.

Here’s the script. I’m not sure it’s the absolute best way to do this—like I said, this was a “page 2 of the tutorial” job—but it does seem to work. To use it, just change the extension to .php and the $username value to your Twitter username. It will take your Twitter RSS feed and:

  • Remove any @replies
  • Remove the “username: ” at the beginning of your tweets
  • Turn any URLs in your tweets into hyperlinks.
  • If you add “?username=someothertweeter” to the URL, it will fetch another user’s RSS feed instead of yours.