Tools: Solved: Automate Twitter/x Posts When A New Blog Post Is Published...

Posted on Jan 23

• Originally published at wp.me

TL;DR: This guide provides a custom, serverless-friendly Python solution to automate X/Twitter posts for new blog articles, eliminating manual effort and recurring SaaS costs. It leverages RSS feeds and the X/Twitter API, scheduled via cron, to automatically announce new content.

In the fast-paced digital landscape, maintaining a strong online presence is paramount for any content creator or organization. For blog publishers, announcing new articles across social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) is a critical step in driving traffic and engagement. However, the manual process of crafting a tweet, copying the link, and posting it every time a new article goes live is not only tedious and repetitive but also prone to human error and delays. Imagine the time saved if this process could be fully automated.

While various SaaS solutions offer social media scheduling and automation, they often come with recurring costs, restrictive feature sets, and a lack of granular control. As Senior DevOps Engineers, we understand the value of bespoke solutions that offer flexibility, cost-efficiency, and deep integration. This tutorial will guide you through building a custom, serverless-friendly automation pipeline using Python, your blog’s RSS feed, and the X/Twitter API. By the end, you’ll have a robust system that automatically tweets about your latest blog posts the moment they’re published, giving you full control and eliminating manual effort.

Before we dive into the automation magic, ensure you have the following components and basic understanding:

The first step is to register your application with the X/Twitter Developer platform and obtain the necessary API credentials. These credentials act as the key to allow your script to interact with the X API on your behalf.

Create a file named secrets.txt in your project directory and add your credentials:

Our Python script will require two external libraries: feedparser to effortlessly parse RSS feeds and tweepy to interact with the X/Twitter API. Let’s install them:

Now, let’s create a basic Python script, tweet_blog_post.py, to read your RSS feed. We’ll also introduce a simple mechanism to track the last published post to avoid tweeting old articles repeatedly.

This script fetches the RSS feed, compares post publication dates with a stored timestamp in last_checked_timestamp.txt, and identifies truly new posts. The timestamp ens

Source: Dev.to