Jekyll Post to Twitter

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Tutorial • 07 February 2021

I love automation, whether it’s to automate something to save time or automate something just because I’m lazy, automation makes everything better in my opinion. I share my blog posts and other things to Twitter all the time, but sometimes I’ll forget so if I can automate it… I won’t forget.

There’s a few tutorials for this online already, but I found that not having a correctly formatted RSS feed prevents the applet from being enabled. I used w3c validator to validate my RSS Feed, but if I provide it for you hopefully it should make it easier for anyone else wanting to do this in the future. 😀

You can find a copy of a working RSS Feed .xml file here

# Requirements

IFTT has a free option that allows you to have 3 applets. If you have 3 applets already that you use regularly, you will need to update your IFTT account to a Pro Account.

# Setup

The set up itself is pretty simple, go to IFTT and create a new applet. For the If This section, you want to select an the RSS Feed option then New feed item. When asked, your feed URL will look something like https://laim.scot/feed.xml or https://laim.scot/feed/rss.xml, just depends how your website is set up. Click Create Trigger and move onto the Then That section.

You can do anything for Then That, but for the purpose of this post I’m going to use a Twitter account. Search for Twitter and select the Post a Tweet option. You can customize the Tweet Text how you like, however the defaults are EntryTitle and EntryURL.

You can update the Feed to include things like a hashtag section, and then automate the hashtags or category that are included in the tweet, but I’ve not done that yet so can’t really tell you how to do what I haven’t done myself. 😌

Click on Create Action and then Continue. You’ll know it will work as expected if the Applet Title has been autogenerated, if it hasn’t then double check that your Twitter account is linked correctly and that your RSS Feed passing all checks for the w3c validator.

There may be a delay between you posting on your blog and the tweet being sent, which I believe is 15 Minutes but this could be different depending on what IFTT are doing now vs. when you read this. If you have any issues, feel free to pop me a tweet or an email and I can try my best to give you a hand.