I’ve been searching for a way to display my Xbox Live status as an RSS feed or similar for my Lifestream. Fortunately, I’ve been using Duncan Mackenzie’s Twitter application. There’s even an API and some other stuff. Unfortunately, I have no idea what to do with it. Yeah. Now, I created an alternative method to using the API, but it requires Twitter, the previously mentioned Xbox to Twitter application and Yahoo! Pipes. Also, sometimes it doesn’t work. I’m going to show you how to set it up, though I would much prefer someone showed me how to set it up using the API.

Firstly, you’ll need a Twitter account. Twitter is an increasingly popular site which is used to tell people your real-life status. It’s kind of hard to explain without making it sound weird, so just sign up and try it out. If you want you can add me as a friend. Now, there are two ways to do this. If you want a Twitter account to be devoted to this Xbox Live status only, it’s a lot easier. If you want to do this with an existing Twitter account that you are using, as I did, you’ll need to follow the full instructions. Now, you need to install Xbox to Twitter and you should probably set it to run at start up as you’ll need this program running for anything to happen. Put in your Xbox Gamertag, Twitter username and Twitter password. Read the instructions on how you want your status to be formatted. I use the following.

Xbox Live Status: <game>, <info>.

Since I was using this with my Lifestream, I needed to put something that would differentiate this from my regular Twitter feed. Now, you’ll probably want to make sure it’s working first, so go set your time limit to something low (for the time being, at least.) Once you’ve played a game while connected to Xbox Live and the time has passed, check that your message is now on Twitter. If so, grab the Atom or RSS feed for your Twitter account and head over to Pipes. You’ll need a Pipes account, if you have an account with one of Yahoo!’s other services, like Flickr, you can use that. Hit “Create a pipe.” If you’ve never used this service before, it’ll probably be a bit confusing, but you’ll probably catch on quickly. I’m already skipping over most non-tutorial elements, so if you need help with Pipes use some of the many resources Yahoo! provides along with the service. Firstly, grab Sources > Fetch Feed and paste in the Twitter feed. Grab Operations > Filter and Operations > Regex, too, and fill in the settings in the image, but you’ll need to replace “Xbox Live Status:” with whatever identifying tag you used. If your Twitter account is being used for this only, you can skip over that part of Regex and

Check the Output. Hopefully it worked. Save it and view the Pipe. If it looks okay, choose Subscribe > Get as RSS. There you go! Now you can use it wherever you want…when it’s working.

If you plan on using it in your Lifestream, you’ll have a problem. Now your Xbox Live Status will be showing up twice, once in the Pipes feed and once in the Twitter feed (assuming you’re using both.) You’ll need to create a Twitter feed, now, that has your regular updates without your Xbox Live updates in it. Create a new Pipe on Yahoo! Pipes. Just pick Fetch Feed and Filter again. Use the same Twitter feed as before and now block all items that contain your identifying text using Filter. Save the Pipe. Now you have two feeds, so you can easily style your two Lifestream entries differently.

You can probably tell, it’s much more efficient to create two Twitter accounts, one for regular use and one for this. I’m probably going to have to switch to that soon, since sometimes the Yahoo! Pipes feeds just become empty. Hopefully someone finds this useful, or, better yet, someone will help me out with the API. Thanks for reading, and since I skipped over a lot of stuff, if you’re confused about something please comment.

Edit: Clearly, I’m stupid. Happy Canada Day, everyone. There’s nothing really going on for it here so I momentarily forgot.

Trackback from your own blog. Add a comment.