Just a quick little tip for OS X users. Nothing fancy, and others may have figured this out already, but a quick Google search didn’t come up with answers, just questions…so here we are.
For the uninitiated, one of the default screensavers in OS X is the RSS Visualizer, which shows a slick ‘floating text’ presentation of the text from any RSS feed against a cloudy blue background.
I wanted to put my Twitter timeline in, so that even when my ‘puter’s not doing anything, and I’m across the room reading on the couch, I can keep an eye out for updates. Seems simple, but on first blush, it didn’t seem to work, as I just got the background, and no tweets.
That’s an easy fix, though. Twitter password protects your RSS feed, so that other people can’t ‘hack’ into your feed and see updates from those of your contacts who have protected their feed from public view — and the screensaver options don’t give a way to enter your Twitter username/password combination.
Twitter does, however, respect RSS-embedded passwords. So, in order to get the screensaver to work correctly, change the RSS feed from the default
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss
to a customized
https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss
format, and you’re off and running.
Note that I’ve changed the protocol from http to https to avoid transmiting my Twitter username and password in cleartext. With the standard http protocol, in theory, if someone was really determined, there’s a chance that they could intercept the TCP stream between your computer and Twitter and see your Twitter login credentials. Using https (the ‘s’ stands for ‘secure’), the information between your computer and Twitter is encrypted, so that packet sniffers wouldn’t get anything.
And that’s it! One Twitter-enabled RSS screensaver.
4 Responses
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This is cool. A further suggestion I’d make, though, is to run your Twitter feed through Yahoo! Pipes first, so that you can make the text a little more nicely formatted. It looks kind of funny with the title of the ‘post’ being also the content of the post.
I whipped up a little Pipe to demonstrate: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=89295fc3f5b474b50480194d1131e519
there you can type a twitter username/password, and it will fetch it, parse it and spit out much cleaner data in rss format.
The direct URL to a cleaned feed would be: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=89295fc3f5b474b50480194d1131e519&_render=rss&username=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD
I have both the username and password strings set to private, so supposedly Yahoo can’t actually remember them past the time it takes to run the pipe. There is no https option, unfortunately.
Anyway, if you want to give it a go, you might be happier with how it looks post-Pipe
Nice! The only downside I see is that it changes the title from ‘Twitter / djwudi with friends’ to ‘Twitter Feed Cleaner-Upper’…but since that only shows up when it wraps around, it’s not a major issue.
Now if I could find a way to change the screensaver to show more than three or four items before wrapping and/or update beyond the initial grab when the screensaver starts…. I think that might be possible, but might take some hacking of the screensaver with Quartz Composer (perhaps using this blog post as a jumping-off point), and I’m not sure I have the time to investigate that right now. Good project for the future, though.
I changed the name of it, but it’s now hard-coded with your info. I’m not guessing anybody else is going to use it, so no harm no foul.
Thank you! Just what I needed.