Twitter to Blog and Back

I had been working on a Twitter interface for the blog that would allow me to do a little micro blogging, but was having trouble getting it to play nice with wp-cache and when it did, it didn’t even show up half the time. So, after hours of frustration I discovered a plugin under development by Alex King called Twitter Tools for Wordpress. It’s in beta, but I have no complaints so far.

I stole some code from it for my sidebar, but am using the plugin in its original form for functions such as automatically announcing blog posts on Twitter with links. It’s functioning really well for such an early beta release. The beauty of it is that it fetches your tweets in the background (with JSON) and stores them in a database. That means faster page loads and the flexibility to turn tweets into posts and digests down the line. My tweets are not nearly interesting enough to become part of my actual blog or show up on my RSS feed, but the basic functionality of the plugin is, in my opinion, a brilliant approach to the dilemma. It also includes a form for a widget or sidebar that can post to Twitter right from your blog when you’re logged in, and you can force the updates any time you like. It even includes a hook for other plugins to trigger on a new tweet.

So now that my sidebar “Doing” feature is working more smoothly, I’m more convinced that Twitter might be the solution for our exterior touchscreen at our office. And I might be a little more regular with my twittering now…