How I found my Twitter RSS feed

Once upon a time, it was easy to add a Twitter user to your RSS feeder by just adding their page to your reader. For example, mine would have been:

• https://twitter.com/#!/tepietrondi

This isn't the case anymore:

I already had some users in my reader, and I wanted to add my own to see what it looked like. Looking at the link structure, the Twitter accounts have a numeric ID:

• https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/numeric-user-id-here.rss

So, what's my user ID. I figured it would be in the Twitter page somewhere in the source and it was. I found it on a unique Twitter post page:

• https://twitter.com/#!/tepietrondi/status/110382214335836162 (yeah, my yahoo account got hacked somehow)

Open up the console and run the the follow jQuery selector to return the user ID:

$(".tweet-user-block-name").children("a").attr("data-user-id")

Turns out my RSS feed is:

• https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/207119481.rss

What's the point right? Well I like RSS and I use it a lot, it also makes writing application to access data more easily rather than using an API. I also don't think Twitter and Facebook are going to kill RSS. They might hide it, or remove it, but the web will hold onto it for a bit longer I think.