For about 2 years now I've been using this 3rd party site, Twitterfeed, to auto tweet my blog posts to my Twitter account. On paper, the site looks great, but in practice, it works poorly and lacks certain features. It can only poll my blog every 30 minutes, at the most frequent setting, for new posts. Despite this setting, sometimes several hours go by after I post before it auto-Tweets the link. Additionally, sometimes it fails to do it at all.
When this happened today, around lunchtime, I finally decided to seek out an alternative. Little did I know that a far superior solution was sitting right in front of me this whole time, and I could have EASILY been using it.
Like many bloggers, I use Feedburner to re-host up my RSS feed for my site because of the greatly increased functionality and control it gives me over my RSS feed. You can do things such as insert code into each blog post (google ads, etc), get detailed analytics on your feed subscribers, and it gives you capabilities like PubSubHubBub.
A quick Google Search for "Twitterfeed Alternative" turned up this blog post from ThinkSplendid, which covered exactly what I was looking for. Apparently, and I did not know this, Feedburner has had the built-in capability of publishing blog post links/summaries to Twitter for some time now. You can find this functionality under the "Publicize" tab -> "Socialize" side-nav link. It does EXACTLY what Twitterfeed does, but with the added reliability of The Google™. What's even better: instead of polling my site every 30 minutes for new posts, it will post a Tweet whenever a new post shows up in my RSS feed - instantly - because my CMS, Squarespace, is PubHubSubBub compatible. Yes, I know this is a very first world problem to have, but it just made my Monday.
