RSS to twitter and mailing list (email)

Linux
Author

Vinh Nguyen

Published

January 26, 2011

In one of my group's website (operated using Google Sites), I post news and announcements to a page that has an RSS feed. I don't expect people to visit the website on a daily basis to find updates. With the RSS feed, updates can come to them using their RSS aggregator or reader of choice, such as Google Reader. However, it seems that in the internet-user population, only a subset uses RSS to get their information aggregated. Some uses twitter, and many uses email. I'd like to get the updates out to as many people as possible. However, I don't like to update each service by itself. My ideal workflow would be to send an email out with the news and the website, RSS feed, twitter, mailing list would be updated. Sending an email out that updates twitter and a mailing list would be easy. However, updating the website and RSS feed would be a lot more complicated, especially where you don't have access to the site's files via ftp or ssh (Google Sites is web-based).

The next best thing would be to update the website via the web interface. The RSS feed would get updated automatically. To get the news to Twitter, there is a free service called twitterfeed. To get the news to a mailing list, I relied on a cron job based on rss2email. Should I have it post to the organization's fan page on facebook as well? I haven't decided yet. What the heck, I'm updating a facebook Group's page using RSS Graffiti.