How to get new torrent updates via Twitter

In our last post we highlighted how important a service Twitter has become in this era. Although there are tons of Twitter apps for various tasks, I’ve not seen many apps that are related to BitTorrent being launched (apart from a few such as TorrentTwitter). This article will teach you how to create a Twitter account that automatically Tweets when new torrents are released on private torrent trackers. It’s not rocket science and is just a matter of bridging together two already existing services; TwitterFeed and tracker RSS.

twitterfeed

What we’re goanna do is to ‘burn’ a private tracker’s RSS feed into Twitter so that it’ll tweet whenever a new torrent is added to the tracker. Yeah it’s basically like subscribing to the RSS feed but with followers and 3rd party Twitter apps it’d be way cooler than RSS.

  1. If you don’t have a Twitter account, go to http://twitter.com/signup and create one now.
  2. Visit www.twitterfeed.com and create a new account. Login using the newly created TwitterFeed account and click on ‘go to my twitter feeds (or create a new one)’.
  3. Click on create new feed. You will be asked to fill a form.
  4. In ‘username’ and ‘password’ fields, type the same username and password used for the Twitter account you created at step 1. Paste a compatible RSS feed from private tracker into the ‘RSS feed’ field. Note: For more help on finding a compatible RSS feed, see the ‘How to find a suitable RSS feed’ section below. Set the ‘Update Frequency’ to ‘Every 30 minutes’.
  5. Now this is important – make sure you un-tick the ‘Include item link’ checkbox (See screenshot below). If you use the RSS feed of a private tracker, leaving this checkbox ticked will expose your passkey to the public - this could get you banned from the tracker.
  6. Tick the ‘Active’ checkbox to activate the feed and press the update button.
    twitterfeed config

That should do it. Your twitter account will now automatically tweet when a new torrent is released on the private tracker of your choice.

Choosing an RSS feed

Most private and public BitTorrent trackers now provide RSS updates. On private trackers these can usually be found on the links.php page (ex-http://www.sitename.com/links.php). Some sites index these under rss.php page. On Gazelle based trackers and several other bittorrent sites, you can get the URL of RSS feed by simply logging onto the site and clicking on the orange RSS icon on the browser address bar.

Feeds compatible with TwitterFeed

Some of the private tracker RSS feeds are incompatible with TwitterFeed. If you try to use an incompatible feed, TwitterFeed will return the error message similar to “We couldn't find valid date/time stamps or GUIDs on items. Please make sure your feed contains valid pubDate entries or GUIDs for each post”. In such cases, the only options is to use a feed from another tracker. Here is a list of public and private site RSS feeds that we've found to be working with TwitterFeed.

Note that some trackers offer categorized RSS feeds. Subscribing to a categorized feed is usually better (some trackers allow you to combine updates from several categories into one RSS feed). Subscribing to the entire feed will send Twitter updates for every torrent added to the tracker whether you like it or not – and we could be talking about a hundred releases per day. When you subscribe to categorized or custom feeds, make sure you choose the ‘no cookies’ version (if available).

Want to see how this works? Check out @updateserv. @updateserv is an experimental Twitter account we made some time ago which Tweets about new Game and Movie releases (based on Romanian Sharereactor’s RSS feed).

updateserv twitter

Also, don’t forget that you can follow @filenetworks on Twitter for latest BitTorrent news, leaks and more.
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