Automatic Tweets for Blogs and Aggregators
Flutter is a social media tool that tweets out dynamic content on a recurring schedule.
The most common feature request since we launched was to tweet out the top article or item on a blog or aggregation site. It was even the first piece of feedback we got from Ryan Hoover himself on our Product Hunt post.
It’s such an obvious feature for Flutter we maybe shouldn’t have launched without it, but we wanted to launch early with a basic product and adapt from there.
Automatic link detection and shortening has been added to Flutter today!
All this means is that, if the element on a web page you choose is a link. for example, the title of the latest post on a blog. Flutter will detect the link, convert it to a shortened link, and add it to the end of your tweets. So your tweet might look something like:
Latest Blog Post Title — via @Flutter_HQ flap.li/4j
flap.li is Flutter’s own short domain name like bit.ly or buff.ly.
Now for a good example.
You could take advantage of this feature by setting up an hourly recurring tweet for the most up-voted product on Product Hunt. This will tell Flutter to attempt to tweet the most up-voted product every hour and only actually tweet it if the top product changes.
To set this up, we need the front page URL of Product Hunt and the CSS selector of the first item in the most up-voted list.
- URL: http://www.producthunt.com/
- CSS Selector: .v-category-tech li:nth-child(1) .post-item — text — name
I know the CSS bit looks a bit confusing, but it’s actually pretty simple to extract. If you’re interested you can check out our walkthrough article on how to get CSS selectors.
So now that we have our inputs, we can format the tweet like this:
It will tweet something like this:
And it will tweet this every hour unless the top product is still the same, in which case it will wait an hour and try again.
The top Product Hunt is just a convenient example, this could be applied to any aggregator or blog home page where there is a constant stream of data.
To make the setup of common recurring tweets like this even easier, we’ve put together an examples page where you can create this tweet with one click.
We have many more ideas for improving Flutter and building a genuinely powerful social media tool.
But we need your help.
If you like what we’re doing and would like to know more about what we’re building next. Or, if you would like to suggest a feature that Flutter is lacking. Please drop me a line on our contact page.
Written by @GarethAFuller
