« Stoking the Fires re Stoker | Home | Average Guy Reflects on Weirdnesses »
WordPress Twitter Tools
By Lester | January 9, 2009
Finding the right tool(s) for integrating Twitter with my blog has been a little less than perfect. I’ve been using Twitter Tools for a couple of months now, and the features and interface are great, but it isn’t entirely dependable. Sometimes I make a blog entry, and it doesn’t announce that to my Twitter account. Sometimes I make a Twitter post, and it doesn’t pick it up for my blog’s sidebar. There’s no apparent rhyme or reason as to when it does or doesn’t work, and while the interface has a button for manual updates, that sort of defeats the purpose.
The one thing it does do faithfully is its “experimental” feature of creating a weekly blog post of my Twitter archives for that week. Go figure.
So I’ve made some changes in the name of dependability. I’ve turned off everything in Twitter Tools except the weekly archive and am now using TwitPress to do blog post announcements to my Twitter account and Twitter for WordPress to display Twitter posts in my blog’s sidebar. Both of these plugins have a five-star rating at WordPress.org; Twitter Tools has slightly less than four stars.
We’ll see how this division of labor works out.
If you decide to follow suit on any of these recommendations, note that once installed, Twitter Tools shows up under “Settings,” TwitPress under “Tools,” and Twitter for WordPress under “Appearance -> Widgets.” Also note that to make TwitPress display permalinks correctly with WP 2.7, you’ll need to edit one line of code. (If you “don’t know from permalinks,” that line can go unedited.)
Topics: Tools (Useful) | 4 Comments »
January 9th, 2009 at 10:29 am
I’ve been debating about whether or not to mess with Twitter mainly because I don’t know what it all does, whether it’s worth my time, or if it’ll just eat up more time. I’ll take another look and debate about adding it through my website, but any warnings are appreciated.
SES
January 9th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Twitter can be a great tool for increasing your ambient awareness of who’s out there and what they’re doing, and for letting other people know what’s up with you. That makes it pretty important for a freelancer such as yourself, Mr. Schend.
Here’s a Twitter introduction post I did a few months ago.
As for eating time, it’s sort of like having background music playing—you can devote as much or as little attention to it as you like. If you do leap in, I recommend using the Twhirl app, because it pops up little windows whenever someone in your list posts, and you can quickly glance to see if the post is something to leap on.
January 19th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Nice post. Thanks for the info!
April 8th, 2010 at 6:57 am
I love Ubuntu. They just announced [url=http://ubuntumaverickmeerkat.com]Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat[/url]. Does anyone else here upgrade as soon as the new one comes out?
I have had problems with that, but the forums always seem to help me fix them fast.