lines of flight

A few notes on how I’m feeling about my blog, Twitter and (what I think is about to be) my embrace of Flickr.

This post looks briefly at two plugins that integrate WordPress and Twitter. I spend a lot of time with each, and this kind of integration makes sense in theory, but I have not yet seen it work incredibly well in practice.

Both Twitter Tools and TweetSuite have options to enable widgets for displaying tweets (including favorited tweets in TweetSuite) and also give the option to auto-tweet when you publish a post.

The developer-described “experimental” digest features of Twitter Tools were the main draw for me to test this WordPress plugin by Alex King. I wanted to see what happens when you extract a specimen of Twitter text and consider it out of context. At the very least, I could have an archive of my tweets.

However, missing for me in the Twitter Tools digest is the option to collect this daily or weekly digest as an Unpublished draft, which would allow me to comment, edit and tag before it goes live, or even chose to keep it private (on account of being extra boring or annoying).

Apparently this plugin isn’t being actively developed anymore, which does not bode well for its usefulness in the future.

The other Twitter-based plugin I’ve tested recently is Dan Zarella’s TweetSuite. TweetSuite generates trackback-like “tweetbacks” that post automatically when anyone twitters a link to a blog page. The list of tweets at the end of the article on Zarella’s page is probably the best(?) example the tweetback display in full force.

To see it on my site, I sent a tweet about my own post, and at the end of that post, voilà! you see the tweet that the twitterverse saw. (You can go ahead and ignore the lame fact that that post has one comment and one tweetback and both are from me :~p what I learned on that post helped me produce a page that got over 3,300 views in one day!)

Neither Twitter Tools nor TweetSuite does it all for me yet, nor are they right for the Mālamalama magazine site. Both my sites may be too non-techie for it to ever take hold, but who knows, even Mālamalama is on Twitter now, so maybe one day…?!