Behind The Blog

Back in June, I asked about what people thought the best plugin was for publishing updates to Twitter when there are new blog posts posted here in WordPress MU/WPMU. I was then and have been using Alex King’s excellent Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress, but it was a bit like using a screwdriver to bang in a nail. The Twitter Tools plugin is primarily designed to capture your tweets in a blog post so that you can have occasional posts on your blog site that include all your tweets. The plugin can also publish tweets when you have a new blog post, but it’s real strength seems to be in pulling your tweets into your blog.

All I want to do is publish new tweets… I don’t want to create blog posts with tweets. So I’ve known for quite some time that I’ve been using the wrong plugin for the job… but it’s worked okay, so I continued. I tried a different plugin over on the VoiceObjects Developer Blog, but I haven’t been as happy with it because it tended to shorten the titles of blog posts too much when posting to Twitter.

However, recently my colleague Ron Blaisdell pointed me to WordTwit from BraveNewCode and I have to say that it is outstanding at what I need it to do. Once you install the plugin, there is a very simple configuration screen where you enter your username, password and can change the format of what gets tweeted out:

In our case, I chose to edit the message to be “[title] - [link]” so that there is no prefix on any of the tweets.

You then can choose which URL shortener you want to use – I chose bit.ly:

After you save the configuration options, you then can go back in and enter your Bit.ly login and API key:

This makes it so that all of your shortened URLs then show up in your bit.ly account where you can see statistics around who has clicked on them, etc.

Because we use Google Analytics, I also checked off an option to add UTM tracking codes to URLs so that I can find any inbound traffic in GA easily.

I’ve been using WordTwit here on blogs.voxeo.com for a bit now and have been very pleased with how well it works. I haven’t yet installed it on the VO Developer Blog but will be doing so soon. Kudos (and thanks!) to the folks at BraveNewCode for developing such a great plugin.

Have you tried WordTwit? Or what plugin do you use for updating Twitter?

Related posts:

1. What is the best Twitter plugin for WordPress MU?
2. Connecting WordPress MU to Twitter to auto-tweet new blog posts
3. Next up – Linking this WordPress MU site to Identi.ca and making it look nice on the iPhone/iPod Touch
4. Adding (video) podcasting support to a WordPress MU (WPMU) installation
5. Mirroring another WordPress blog in a WordPress MU site?

Tags: Plugins, Twitter, WordPress, wordpressmu, WPMU