Using NetNewsWire with Your Blog, Twitter, and Del.icio.us

One of the greatest things about the greatest RSS reader on the Mac, NetNewsWire, is how many things it can integrate with. It can go hand-in-hand with your blog, your Twitter account, your Del.icio.us account and many others because of its scriptability.

How to use with your blog

If you’re using the latest NetNewsWire you’ve probably noticed the “Post to Weblog” icon.

When viewing an article you can either click on that icon or use Shift-Command-P.

To post to your blog NetNewsWire needs to go through one of the many Blogging clients on the Mac like ecto or MarsEdit.

One you have one of those installed make sure that it is seen by NetNewsWire by going to Preferences (Command-,) -> Posting. Change “Post to weblog using:” to whatever client you’re using.

Now when you use “Post to Weblog” your client will open up automatically create a new post and insert the link into the editor.

How to use with your Del.icio.us account

I depend on Del.icio.us for storing and centralizing all of my bookmarks. Therefore the web apps I use must have the ability to integrate with Del.icio.us, and NetNewsWire–no exceptions.

NetNewsWire has a few different ways to post your news articles to Del.icio.us, if you go back to Preferences (Command-,) -> Posting, you’ll see “Post to Del.icio.us using:”.

Your options for posting to Del.icio.us include Pukka, Cocoalicious, Postr, Webnotehappy, and your plain old web browser.

I prefer the web browser, so when I use the “Post to Del.icio.us” function (News -> Post to Del.icio.us or Control-Command-’) NetNewsWire will bring up this small window from del.icio.us:

Pukka, and Cocoalicious are the other two clients that I would recommend. Unfortunately, Pukka costs $14.95. While Cocoalicious is free, it has lately had a pretty slow development cycle along with some problems using the Del.icio.us API.

Postr is almost a legacy app right now that never really got off the ground and Webnotehappy costs $24.95 for a single user.

How to use with your Twitter account

NetNewsWire also integrates with Twitter through Twitterrific. The function is bound to News -> Post to Twitterrific (Control-T).

Twitterrific automatically sends your link to Twitterrific in the form: Reading “title of the article” at “URL of the site”. Like so:

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For some other tips on using NetNewsWire check out here (it has a lot of links to other sources as well.)