RTE News App for iPhone – How to share articles on Twitter

RTE released a really nice iPhone App on January 18^th for keeping up to date with all the latest news from the rte.ie website. A lot of people will already get their RTE news delivered via RSS feed or browsing the mobile version of the RTE website so it may seem pointless to have a dedicated app for the task. Having installed just yesterday I think it’s a more pleasant viewing experience. The addition of the live news video stream makes it a must have.

One slight oversight is the omission of Twitter as a share option when viewing articles. Email, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious and Stumbleupon are all included. Maybe it was a deliberate decision to exclude Twitter as there are already so many accounts on Twitter with feeds of RTE News articles already. There is a way to Tweet news articles within the app in a slightly roundabout way.

If you have an account Delicious and want to Tweet a link from within the app, just tag the article in Delicious with something like Tweeting or Tweet. Fill in whatever other tags you want to use to bookmark the news item.

You can then use Twitterfeed to send the Tweet for you (you will, of course, need to set up an account there).

Simply create a new feed and enter the details of the RSS feed of your delicious account followed by the Tag you are using on Delicious to Tweet bookmarks.

In my case, I’m using tweeting as the tag to indicate those links I’d like to Tweet. The RSS feed for those tags is:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/lecraic/tweeting

Your feed will look very similar, apart from lecraic and tweeting. Replace lecraic with your username and tweeting with the tag you are using to tag news items to be tweeted.

Here is the Twitterfeed configuration screen for reference.

Once all of this has been done, you are set to go. Next time you see an article on the RTE News Now App on your iPhone, just click on Delicious to share the item, and then enter the tweeting tag and save the bookmark. Twitterfeed will pick up the new entry from your Delicious feed and Tweet the link for you.

No doubt there are other ways to accomplish the same task, but as I already use Delicious I found this to be the handiest way for me.

Updated versions of the App may include the Twitter in which case none of this will be necessary. So if you are reading this after January 24^th 2010, there may be an update available which has Twitter sharing integrated. If this is the case, none of the above is necessary.