On This Day - Blog 15 Nov 09

The "On This Day" feature is now being automatically blogged in conjunction with the other ways it is piped to the public. After various experiments I have decided that this is the most effective way to post automatically to Twitter.

The system uses Google Calendar reminders as the source. They are sent to a special email address which automatically forwards them to the blog. The RSS feed from the blog is posted to Twitter using Twitterfeed.

There are five main benefits with this method: (1) Once I have set up and fully populated the calendar I can forget the whole thing (hooray!); (2) the calendar itself can be embedded at the bottom of the blog so that the whole year can be checked if desired (at the moment it is only populated until the end of the year); (3) Google Calendars have a Geo Location tie-in with Maps so that each blog post can have a location link; (4) 'Comments' are allowed in the blog so people can add their own relevant event to the bottom of a date post (moderated); and (5) if you use Google Calendars you can import the calendar into yours.

The blog is accessible from the red 'blog button' below the iframe of the feed at the top of the homepage - next to the orange 'RSS feed'.