The Elusive Aim of Daily Twitter Digests to Blogger

I’ve been beating my head against a basic technical question for about a week now and have made zero progress on it thus far.  So in keeping with the way I’ve always coped with this sort of thing, I’m going to put pen to paper – in this case fingers to keyboard – and write about the issue in the hopes of realising something I’ve overlooked.

The fundamental objective is to develop a process of capturing a day’s worth of Twitter posts, and auto-posting them in digest form to a Blogger/Blogspot blog.

The logic behind this is to help with a note-taking, record-keeping process that we are responsible for, in which we can quickly jot down points through-out the day via Twitter, and have an easy way to review and summarise them later.

You could of course suck in the RSS feed for an individual account, pass it through Posterous, and then autopost it to Blogger, however this would create a new post for every single Tweet, which is not what we’re after.

Yet despite this, for the life of me I cannot locate an easy way of implementing this system.

With WordPress the solution is quite straightforward – there are any number of plugins that can be integrated to the base blog software that will do all this for you.  Unfortunately with Blogger no such plugins seem to exist.  So what is exceptionally easy in one platform is increasingly becoming a complex system design process in the other.

Google Alerts

I’m was looking at Google Alerts as an option, however doesn’t seem to do what I need it to either.  While I can seem to get Alerts sending me daily email digests of posts “from:http://twitter.com/mbogle” the daily digest option is unavailable when you select “deliver to feed.”  You end up with the same itemised stream of updates that you started with.

Yahoo! Pipes
The other possibility I was considering was trying to set up a “pipe” using Yahoo! Pipes, and see if this might do the job, but having looked at the system I’m finding I’m just smart enough to design a solution – or indeed determine if it’s even possible – so the constraints of my technical skills have more or less scuttled that possibility.

More investigation required…
At this point I’m coming up empty-handed no matter which way I turn, so I’ll just have to keep looking.  Ultimately I find it amazing that no system exists yet for Blogger that will let you do this.

Not sure why that is, but if you’ve got tech skills it would seem to be a good opportunity.

If I can manage to figure out how on earth to do this I’ll post the solution here.  Otherwise if you happen to know a way I’ve overlooked PLEASE post a comment or trackback here and enlighten me.

Mike, out.