So far for one microniche I have well over 100 ‘words’ that I use for google alerts, twitter searches and the like. That’s a lot of twitter searches to create, click on the feed icon, and then bring the feed into the FF room.

But there’s no need to do all that.

Each twitter search feed for “your keyword” is of the form:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%22your+keyword%22

where %22 represents the quote mark: ” .

I find Word a handy program for sorting the list into manageable alphabetical order and then arranging into the above format, but any text writer that has the ability to sort and has a decent ‘find and replace’ facility will do. The following notes refer to the use of Word, starting with a keyword list that has a paragraph (carriage return) between each item and no quote marks in the list. You might find it useful to keep a spare copy of the list at every stage of the following manipulation.

Paste your list into Word, highlight the list and click on the Table menu’s AZ Sort (or press Alt+a followed by s on your keyboard) to sort them into alphabetical order. Choose “Sort by Paragraphs”

Again highlight the list. Press Control+H to bring up the ‘Find and Replace’ dialogue window.

In the ‘Replace’ tab, in the box beside ‘Find what’, put:

^p

In the ‘Replace with’ box put:

%22^phttp://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%22

Click on ‘Replace All’.

When asked ‘Do you want to search the remainder of the document?’ click ‘No’. Paste:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%22

in front of the first item in the list.

Again highlight the whole list and press Control+H.

In the ‘Replace’ tab, in the box beside ‘Find what’, this time simply press the space bar once.

In the ‘Replace with’ box put:

+

Now go to the FF room into which the twitter search feeds will be imported. Click on ‘Import site’. Click on the top left item, ‘Blog’.

Paste the first item of the list into the box and click on ‘Import Blog’, then the next item, then the next etc.

I haven’t found a way to automate this last part of the process, but the whole operation certainly beats the alternative method.

Isha

P.S. If you use WPD and ever change the title of a post, never ever go back into the post using the WPD interface…

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