Twitter and GAIM

I just set up GAIM (2.0.0beta5, under Windows) to work with my Twitter account and thought I’d make a note of how I did it, although it was pretty straightforward.

I typed in my GMail address (the full one, i.e. with the @gmail.com part) at Twitter’s devices page and chose GTalk as the protocol. Then I added twitter@twitter.com to my buddy list in GAIM, for the GTalk (Jabber) account.

It took some time for twitter@twitter.com to come online but eventually he did, and I was able to tell him my confirmation code. He said That worked! What are you doing? Send OFF at any time to turn off notifications to this device and that was it, apparently: now I can update my status by talking to twitter@twitter.com.

Initially I picked the wrong protocol (Jabber, since that is what GTalk is based on). Things seemed to go smoothly despite this, and apparently, based on my e-mail address, Twitter even knew I was referring to GTalk, but when I added twitter@twitter.com to my buddies list, he wouldn’t come online. The big Delete and start over button was very handy, and after doing it the way described above, it worked ok.

CrimeNews 2000 feed

I just crafted a feed for CrimeNews 2000 which gathers crime and criminal justice news, using Feed43 (via Micro Persuasion). It was astonishingly and pleasantly simple and functional, following the step-by-step example.

Renaming my feed a little more user-friendly, I was told my first choice (crimenews2000.xml) was already taken, so I realized somebody had already created a feed for CrimeNews 2000, but I dare say mine is a bit fancier with the excerpts also extracted. :)