How to Add Your Twitter RSS to the RSS Feed Block

If you have a Twitter page then you are one of many who are taking advantage of being able to send sweet tweets to those who you've connected with. If you're wondering what Twitter is about, you can check out my page at www.twitter.com/jamestadeo or go visit Twitter.com to find out more. In this tutorial, I will show you how to add your Twitter RSS to the RSS Feed block for your Boonex Dolphin site. Here's a sample Twitter-in-a-block at my tutorial site.

Before you can start showing your tweets, you need to have a Twitter account.

I think it should be standard that if you have a Web site, you should have a corresponding Twitter page to complement what you're doing. You should also hurry up. You remember what happened with domains? Well the same is happening with Twitter. I am talking about those Cyber squatters. In this case, they are Twitter squatters or Twatt...er, oh never mind. You get the point. Ok, so sign up already.

Once you've signed up, you will get a page all to yourself. This page allows you to send out tweets to those who follow you or view your page. And if you have some artistic skills, you can also customize the color and background of your Twitter page. If your art skill are a bit sparse, fret not, as there are a set of decent templates you can use.

Let's Get Our Twitter RSS

Before we can add the RSS to our RSS Feed block, we need the location of the Twitter RSS feed. Here's what we need to do:

1. Go to your twitter account. On the right side, you should see an RSS icon.  If you don't see it, it could be loading or you need to click the number to the right of the Updates tab. A few times, I've gone to my Twitter page and had to click around the tabs so the RSS Feed would load.

2. Clicking on the RSS icon or link will take you to the rss feed. Notice the location in the URL. We will need that information to add to our Dolphin RSS Block.

3. Copy the URL for your rss feed and save it somewhere because we're going to need it later on.. I normally have notepad open to save things like this just in case.

4. The next step is to login to your Dolphin admin.

5. Once logged in, select Builders then Pages Builder.

6. Once in page builder, drag the RSS Feed block to the Active Blocks area. The default home page has an array of blocks already there.

7. Clicking on the title of the RSS Feed block will open up a dialog box. We can then add some information.

8. Remember that Twitter RSS location we copied earlier from Twitter. Well, we're going to paste it into the Url of RSS feed text box and enter 5 for the Number of RSS items.

9. After saving the RSS Feed block, you should see it appear in your page. In this tutorial, I chose the homepage to display my tweets.

There are a number of other useful things in Twitter that you can use to complement your  social networking site. If you are inclined to do some development, check out the Twitter API.

I hope you've been able to just a small sampling of what is possible with Dolphin Smart Community Builder created by BoonEx.

Thanks for reading this far.

Happy Twittering!