I recently set up a new Twitter account that shares links to some of the smaller stories I come across in my news reading for PHPDeveloper.org called @phpquickfix. I recently had started playing with Gimme Bar more and wondered how easy it’d be to set it up as a backend repository for some links. Thanks to some hints from other blog posts, it was super easy to set up a “one click syndication” system that combines Gimme Bar, Twitterfeed and a little bit of PHP.

Here’s how it’s set up:

• I have an account for the PHP Quick Fix over on Gimme Bar here. I use their Chrome extension (and sometimes the bookmarklet) to grab the pages that I want to add.
• There’s a little PHP script I put together that does a few things – first, if the cached json from the Gimme Bar feed is out of date, it grabs it and wgets the latest from their API. Then it parses this json and outputs it as a simple RSS feed. You can see the result here.
• Finally, we add Twitterfeed into the mix – it pulls from the RSS feed and posts it to Twitter automatically.

The end result is a system where I can click “Gimme the Page” to my public collection and let the services do the rest. There’s no automation in the link selection – it’s all chosen with my own “human aggregation system”. I think it’s a pretty simple solution to the problem – plus it has the added benefit of making a good collection of hand-picked PHP resources for anyone to pull from.

UPDATE: You can also directly access the PHP Quick Fix posts over on it’s feed: http://phpquickfix.me/feed.