Twitterfeed is a handy RSS to Twitter service that reads your blog's RSS feed and submits it to Twitter and Facebook.  We were using it on OverclockersClub to sync up our news with our Facebook fanpage and Twitter account, but I was less than thrilled with its performance.

If you have a Wordpress blog and use Twitterfeed Stop Now! Here's Why:

Reliability

Several times over the summer we had "feed" outtages where users complained that Twitter and/or the Facebook updates stopped.  Both times turned out to be Twitterfeed related.  The problem with Twitterfeed is that if you're not watching your feeds you won't know you had any problems until someone tells you.  Twitterfeed may have solved these outtages, but if it does strike again when will you know?  It only checks every 30 minutes at best for your feeds so you won't know for up to 30 minutes whether the updates will even happen.

Speed

Twitterfeed's highest speed setting is to check your feeds every 30 minutes.  If you're competing against other bloggers and sites,  30 minutes is a huge lag between when you write something and when your Twitter followers and Facebook fans get the news. 

Alternatives:

On TalkAndroid we never used Twitterfeed at all, instead we opted to go with a plugin called WP to Twitter for our tweets.  WP to Twitter sends the tweets the moment you publish a post, and also supports your Twitter API key if you've got one.  If it fails to tweet you'll also know right away because you get an error box in your Wordpress admin interface.  That solves both of the problems I have with Twitterfeed right there.

For our Facebook page we're using Steve Atty's excellent Wordbooker plugin.  It too posts instantly to your Facebook page or Facebook Wall.  It's a bit tricky to setup and might take some patience, but Steve is amazingly responsive on his support forum on Facebook.


If you run a Wordpress site and are using Twitterfeed, dlvr.it or another such service try the above two alternatives.  If you're running custom blog software I strongly suggest rolling your own API calls to Twitter and Facebook, which lets you brand yourself too by linking to your site instead of another service with each Tweet/FB post.


Addendum:

OverclockersClub is a custom CMS so we can't use these plugins.  We do use dlvr.it now, but ultimately a custom system to send the tweets and FB page shares via official APIs would be the "ideal" solution.

In Invision Power Board 2 you could hide text in their templates by preventing it from showing to logged in users.  The code looked like this:

<if="$this->ipsclass->member['id'] == 0">
Hello, guest
</if>

In IPB3 templates this didn't work at all.  Instead, to limit your code to show only to guests and not to registered users use the following:

<if test="$this->memberData['member_id'] == 0">
Hello, guest
</if>