Task
Auto-posting your activity from the N-1 social network as Twitter and Identi.ca status updates. It is not required to post all and every activity, but the most meaningful part would be to post the N-1 "wire posts", which are Twitter-like short status updates within N-1.
N-1 wire posts to Twitter
Access your N-1 wire posts as RSS feed and use a web service that posts RSS to your Twitter / Identi.ca account. Step by step:
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Log into your n-1.cc account, click in the main menu on "The Wire", then on the tab "Mine". The page's URL will look like
https://n-1.cc/thewire/owner/your-user-name -
In the right area of the page, you see an RSS icon for this very page (that is, your own wire posts). Copy its link location; that will be an URL looking like:
https://n-1.cc/thewire/owner/your-user-name?view=rss -
Choose a web service that can post RSS entries to social networks, according to your needs:
- IFTTT – The most powerful variant, but also more complex. Allows rule-based connections between (currently) 59 channels, including Twitter and many other social networking stuff, but missing identi.ca [source].
- Twitterfeed – With them, you can post your RSS entries to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin [source].
- Dlvr.it – You can post your RSS feed (and other sources) to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and App.net, according to my own test.
- Use your above RSS URL and configure your web service of choice to post your RSS entries to Twitter.
Note that this solution is not fast because it is polling-based. If you use IFTTT for example, the polling period is 15 minutes. The N-1 RSS feed does not have PuSH support, so you cannot use the IFTTT Quick Triggers or similar mechanisms to get instant updates.
N-1 wire posts to Identi.ca
Alternative 1 (best): Sync Identi.ca to Twitter
The only working solution that I found was getting your N-1 wire posts over to Twitter as indicated above, then syncing your Identi.ca account with your Twitter account with Identi.ca's "Settings -> Twitter" feature.
Alternative 2: Self-hosted utility
There are at least two utilities you can run on your own server to poll any RSS feed and publish its entries to Identi.ca (via its API):
Alternative 3: Adding PuSH to the RSS feed, feeding to Identi.ca mirroring
This would normally be a straighforward solution like this: (Note that the first two steps are the same as in the Twitter solution.)
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Log into your n-1.cc account, click in the main menu on "The Wire", then on the tab "Mine". The page's URL will look like
https://n-1.cc/thewire/owner/your-user-name -
In the right area of the page, you see an RSS icon for this very page (that is, your own wire posts). Copy its link location; that will be an URL looking like:
https://n-1.cc/thewire/owner/your-user-name?view=rss -
Log in to your Identi.ca account.
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Navigate to "Settings -> Mirroring -> RSS or Atom feed"
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Enter your RSS feed URL that you determined above, click "Add feed".
However, at this point you get "Internet Server Error: Could not subscribe to feed." from Identi.ca even though the RSS feed is working, publicly accessible and has a post in it. This is because Identi.ca expects the feed to support PubSubHubbub [source1, source2], which the n-1.cc feed does not support.
So what you have to do is adding PubSubHubbub to your RSS feed without admin access. It's technically possible, but in this particular case quite an effort because the n-1.cc feeds use HTTPS only (which is not compatible with feedburning the feeds to add PuSH). See my linked post for details.
Other Activity to Twitter / Identi.ca
Currently not possible.
Long story: Your N-1 wire posts RSS feed is publicly accessible (as of 2012-12-23). That's why the IFTTT / Twitterfeed / Dlvr.it services could be used on it. Interestingly, all other RSS feeds for other types of activity are password protected, they only work if you are logged in. That is, they are inaccessible for web services like IFTTT and Twitterfeed. (Even worse, a proper N-1 RSS URL like https://n-1.cc/activity/owner/some-user-name?view=rss will always show your own activity regardless of what user name you put in.)
Now there is one tool called Zapier that can access password-protected RSS feeds and create unprotected feeds from them (or directly push the message to Twitter – not to Status.net services like Identi.ca however). I did not try this, however I assume that this refers to Basic HTTP authentication, while your required N-1 login is something else. Probably won't work so.
So we better care to get the bugs fixed in the N-1 software so that all public content is also available in RSS feeds without the need to log in. (A friend of mine reported these issues 2012-12-23, so they might be fixed soon.)
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