On Twitter, I've set up an an automated account about autistic Australians. It's meant to automatically post any news about autism that appears in the Australian media. It's far from perfect.
It works like this: I've set up a Google Alert with the keywords "Autism OR Asperger", and told it to search for those keywords in the categories of Web and News, and only in Australia. I've limited it to the Best content, because otherwise I'd have to find a way to filter out the spammy sites that would appear. The Google Alert compiles all the links it finds into an RSS. I've set up a process on the social media automatic site Integromat, which every eight hours will hopefully scan the Google Alerts RSS, remove Google's junk code from the links and copy them onto Twitter alongside the hashtag #autism. The resulting Twitter post has a picture, the headline, the name of the news source, all of which will hopefully persuade the viewer that the link is legit. I'm really not a computer person, so I'm happy to have achieved this much.
I hope someone somewhere finds this Twitter account useful. It's good to be able to find all this news in the one place.
13 May 2017, 1:59 am
