Easy methods of grabbing a RSS feed of a Twitter list or Twitter user

Published 2011-10-18

Over the past year or so, Twitter has gone and made it increasingly difficult to find, isolate and subscribe to RSS feeds of folks you follow.

So why would grabbing a RSS feed of a particular Twitter list be any different?

Turns out, it’s not at all difficult thanks to this post via David B. Calhoun’s blog.

To generate an RSS feed of a Twitter List you have to make two alterations to a standardised URL; http://api.twitter.com/1/INSERT USERNAME>/lists/INSERT TWITTER-LIST/statuses.atom

So RSS for my CoWorkers-Inspiration list is a structured API query like this:

http://api.twitter.com/1/chrislkeller/lists/CoWorkers-Inspiration/statuses.atom

Grabbing RSS for a twitter user is nearly as easy, though you have to duck into idfromuser.com.

A standard Twitter user’s RSS feed looks like this: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/USER ID.rss

The XXX is an ID unique to each Twitter account. To get your, or any Twitter user’s, RSS URL you should replace the XXX with their ID number.

So RSS for my status updates would be:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/17668455.rss