Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

What the ___?? NO, Twitter, I did NOT recommend those users! TWEET BUTTON FAIL!

Friday, August 13th, 2010

No sooner had I written the last post, How To Add Twitter’s “Official” Tweet Button to WordPress MU, saying that the recommendation feature wasn’t working for me, when it did work for me -

BUT NOT WITH ANYONE I WOULD RECOMMEND!!!

Here is what I got:

twitterrecommendations.jpg

Now I very definitely did NOT recommend either of those accounts.  The “SMS” one appears to be a dormant account (at least, it has no tweets) and, no offense to Twitter, I wouldn’t go recommending their account from our corporate account.

What’s up, Twitter? Are you going to follow the recommendations that I have asked for in configuring the Tweet button? (using the plugin)

Or are you going to be randomly displaying recommendations of other people?

Because if you are saying “Voxeo (@voxeo) recommends you follow” and then including random users, YOUR “TWEET” BUTTON WILL BE YANKED OFF OUR SITE faster than you can say “tweet”!

I’m hoping this is just a failure of a half-baked feature…  and that it will soon be fixed.

What are others seeing?  If you are using the “Tweet” button and tweeting out links from your site, what recommendations do you see?

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Posted in Plugins, Twitter, WordPress MU | 4 Comments »

How To Add Twitter’s “Official” Tweet Button to WordPress MU

Friday, August 13th, 2010
UPDATE Aug 13 – I had to disable the plugin after Firefox on Mac users indicated that they received multiple popup windows like this when browsing our site: twitterbuttonerror.jpg

I don’t know yet whether this is an issue with our WordPress theme, with the Twitter Button plugin or with the service from Twitter itself. Stay tuned…

With Twitter releasing their new “Tweet Button” yesterday, I was naturally interested in figuring out how to add the button to this site. Mashable had the first post out that I saw explaining the easy steps: “HOW TO: Use Tweet Buttons as a Blogger or Site Owner“. In going to Twitter’s “Tweet Button” page, it’s a fairly straightforward process to get the code you need.

THE PLUGIN

However, I want to make system admin of this blog server as painless as possible so before I added the code to our theme I looked around for a plugin. I was delighted to see in the comments to the Mashable post that a gent named Alex Cristache had already coded up a “Twitter Button Plugin for WordPress” plugin.

I downloaded and installed it into the wp-contents/plugins and activated it for one of our blogs. (More on site-wide activation in a minute.) It has a very easy to use admin screen that appeared from a link at the bottom of my admin navbar. (Note: I’m still running WPMU 2.9.2 here, so with 3.0.x it may appear differently.) The panel lets me make various config choices. I left it all at the defaults except for three areas:

twitterbuttonsettings2.jpg

  1. I needed to change the Twitter user name to ours.
  2. I changed the recommended user (Alex, the plugin author :-) ) to be one of our other Twitter accounts. This will apparently appear in the window from Twitter after you share the link,although it’s not doing so for me right now. (probably a load issue at Twitter):
    twitterbuttonrecommendations.jpg
  3. I changed the “margin-top” attribute in the CSS so that the Tweet button appeared in line with the top of the article text. This is a personal preference thing… and I like it this way.

With that, the tweet button was up and running on one of the blogs. I went on to test with another and all worked fine.

SITE-WIDE ACTIVATION

We support about a dozen active blogs on blogs.voxeo.com and I really didn’t want to have to go to each one to change around these defaults…. so I started hacking the code before doing the “Activate Site Wide” link.

Diving into wp-content/plugins/wp-twitter-button, I opened twitter-button.php and changed these lines:

function tb_activate() {
        $default_settings = Array(
                'tb_home' => 1,
                'tb_archive' => 1,
                'tb_feed' => 1,
                'tb_page' => 1,
                'tb_box' => 'vertical', // can be none, horizontal or vertical
                'tb_style' => 'float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 20px;',
                'tb_position' => 'before', // can be before or after
                'tb_via' => 'Twitter',
                'tb_recommended_id' => 'Blogsessive',
                'tb_recommended_description' => 'Blogging, Social Media and ...'
        );

 

to these lines (changes in red):

 

function tb_activate() {
        $default_settings = Array(
                'tb_home' => 1,
                'tb_archive' => 1,
                'tb_feed' => 1,
                'tb_page' => 1,
                'tb_box' => 'vertical', // can be none, horizontal or vertical
                'tb_style' => 'float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 0px;',
                'tb_position' => 'before', // can be before or after
                'tb_via' => 'voxeo',
                'tb_recommended_id' => 'tropo',
                'tb_recommended_description' => 'Tropo is a powerful yet simple API ...'
        );

(Note that I have not included the entire “recommended description” in this code example purely for space/layout reasons with this blog post. In the file I have the full descriptions.)

I then went ahead and clicked the “Activate Twitter Button for WordPress Site Wide” link on my Plugins panel and it worked fine.

THE END RESULT

I now have the official “Tweet” button working on my WPMU 2.9.2 install and it seems to be working fine. The issues I see so far:

1. TWEET COUNT IS OFF – It seems the big issue everyone has right now is that the count of the number of tweets is off a bit. Commenters to the Mashable post and to the WordPress plugin page both indicate this is a problem. The plugin author stated this:

That ZERO tweets “bug” is actually caused by Twitter’s method to calculate tweets. They calculate them based on the number of search results on Twitter for the shared URL, and since their search history doesn’t go that far behind, some of the posts will display 0. The API they have provided is still far from perfect, but I think they said the button is hosted on a different server which might mean that from now on, all counts will not depend on the search anymore so new posts should be fine.

 

2. WISH THE NUMBER WOULD NOT SHOW IF “0″ – Given that count issue, I wish there was the option to NOT display the count if the number of tweets is zero. It’s just a perception thing… I’d like to not show that a particular article hasn’t had an Twitter-love yet (particularly if it did have tweets and now doesn’t have a count as an artifact of Twitter’s problems) I intend to make the suggestion back to the plugin author… but this may be a Twitter issue.

 

3. DO RECOMMENDATIONS WORK? WHAT IF I ONLY WANT ONE? – So far when I’ve tweeted out a blog post using the button, I’ve not yet seen the “recommendations” screen that Twitter says we’ll see. Is Twitter not displaying it right now? Does it work? What if I don’t want to recommend a second account- do I just leave that field blank in the plugin panel?

Obviously before I can answer any of that I have to see recommendations. :-)

 

Overall, though, it seems to be working great. Kudos to Alex Cristache for coming out with this plugin so quickly. It’s a great help and saved me from hacking away on my theme.

Anyone else found another way (or plugin) to do this? What have you found so far?

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Posted in Plugins, Twitter, WordPress MU | 7 Comments »

WordTwit – a great way to tweet posts from WordPress MU

Friday, December 4th, 2009

wordtwitlogo.jpgBack 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:

wordtwit-msg1.jpg

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:

wordtwit-bitly1-1.jpg

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

wordtwit-bitly2.jpg

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?

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Posted in Plugins, Twitter, WordPress MU | 4 Comments »

What is the best Twitter plugin for WordPress MU?

Monday, June 29th, 2009

twitter.png

What is the best Twitter plugin for WordPress MU for simply publishing tweets when new blog posts are published? Or for WordPress in general?

It’s a question I’ve been mulling over a lot recently as I’ve been looking at:

  1. Reducing the number of tweaks I have to make to WordPress plugins on this site; and

  2. Linking other company WordPress sites into our Voxeo twitter stream.

Back in December 2007, when I first linked this blog site to our Twitter stream, I wound up using Alex King’s great Twitter Tools plugin (see also here). The challenge, though, is this:

I had to hack the plugin code to make it work for us.

THE PROBLEM

Specifically, I went into the code to remove the “New blog post:” that gets added as a prefix to any new message going out to Twitter. This is difficult to do by design, as Alex states in his plugin FAQ:

Is there any way to change the ‘New Blog Post:’ prefix when my new posts get tweeted?

Yes there is, but you have to change the code in the plugin file.

The reason this is done this way, and not as an easily changeable option from the admin screen, is so that the plugin correctly identifies the tweets that originated from previous blog posts when creating the digest posts, displaying the latest tweet, displaying sidebar tweets, and creating blog posts from tweets (you don’t want tweets that are blog post notifications being treated like tweets that originated on Twitter).

Can I remove the ‘New Blog Post:’ prefix entirely?

No, this is not a good idea. Twitter Tools needs to be able to look at the beginning of the tweet and identify if it’s a notification from your blog or not. Otherwise, Twitter Tools and Twitter could keep passing the blog posts and resulting tweets back and forth resulting in the ’spinning fireball of death’ mentioned above.

I have, of course, removed the prefix entirely. And now the problem is that whenever I need to upgrade the plugin, I have to remember to make this modification. Not good.

The issue is that there is a basic fundamental disconnect between the purpose of the Twitter Tools plugin and what I want to do.

The Twitter Tools plugin allows you not only to publish Twitter messages when you have a new blog post, but also perhaps more importantly to publish a blog post aggregating all your Twitter messages. So at some interval you have a new blog post that contains all your recent tweets. While I can see this being tremendously useful in some cases, and is honestly something I’ve been thinking about for my own personal blog, the truth is that for the Voxeo blog portal…

I don’t care!

All I really want out of the Twitter plugin is to publish a tweet whenever we publish a new blog post. I want the one-way push. And that is not where the power lies in the Twitter Tools plugin.

The challenge now in mid-2009 is that it seems like every developer, their brothers, sisters, parents, aunts and uncles have made a Twitter plugin for WordPress – there’s a zillion of them!

A SOLUTION?

So far, in the limited time I’ve had to research this, the plugin that has caught my eye is “Twitter Publisher” by Timan Rebel. It does precisely what it is says… very simply publishes a tweet any time you post a blog post. It does have the ability to add a tweet prefix, but that is blank by default. It also nicely has the ability to use either the bit.ly or awe.sm URL shortening service, which lets me tie the shortened URLs into my bit.ly account for tracking purposes.

I’ve installed this over on the VoiceObjects Developer Portal, which is currently a standalone WordPress (not WPMU) site, and so tweets now appear in our main Twitter stream when blog posts are published there. So far it seems to be working fine, although a couple of times I have been puzzled by how it has abbreviated the blog post title. For instance, here, pointing to this blog post, the post title is:

Adapt-to-me, as I don’t want to adapt to you

yet it was shortened to:

Adapt-to-me, as I don’t want to adap…

which seems strange as it didn’t seem to need to be shortened like that.

Outside of that, it’s been working well so far. I’m intrigued to try out the capability to also send a message to an author’s Twitter account based on including an author’s Twitter name in his/her profile.

MOVING AHEAD

Part of my reason for writing this post is to find out what plugins others have found useful for one-way publishing to Twitter. I have two steps I need to take:

  1. Add a Twitter plugin to blog.imified.com so that posts there automatically appear in our main Twitter stream (Added challenge there: ideally we would like tweets to appear in both @voxeo and @imified)

  2. Replace the Twitter plugin I use here at blogs.voxeo.com in our WordPress MU installation so that I can remove one post-plugin-upgrade tweak I have to make.

The one challenge with Twitter Publisher is that it’s not 100% clear that it will work with WordPress MU, although I’ve generally found most WP plugins to work well with WPMU.

So I throw the question out there… what Twitter plugins for WordPress MU (or WordPress) have you found work the best for updating your Twitter stream whenever you publish a new blog post?

(Thanks in advance)

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Posted in Plugins, Twitter, WordPress MU | 2 Comments »

Connecting WordPress MU to Twitter to auto-tweet new blog posts

Monday, December 31st, 2007

twitter.pngGiven that over the past year Twitter has emerged as one of the new communication tools within social media, one of my natural reactions was to figure out how to connect this blog site to Twitter so that a post/tweet would appear in twitter.com/voxeo whenever we posted a new article. (If you are not aware of Twitter, my external “The 10 ways I learned to use Twitter in 2007” should give you an overview.) My main reason for wanting to do this was to provide another way for people to stay up on what we post here. For some people, myself included, it’s easier to follow someone on Twitter than even to subscribe to their RSS feeds. So I wanted to make it easy for someone to “follow” the posts we create here on blogs.voxeo.com.

My first instinct was to simply go over to Twitterfeed.com and set up a link between our RSS feed for all posts and our new Twitter account. This undoubtedly would have been the simplest path to go – and one I’d probably recommend for others. There were however, several problems/challenges/concerns:

  1. Twitterfeed.com requires the use of OpenID to login, which, as an OpenID advocate, I delight in. However, I wanted to create the feed using a Voxeo-related OpenID versus one of my own, so first I needed to go and turn this blog site into an OpenID provider.

  2. My second concern was just that Twitterfeed.com seemed somewhat inefficient in that it has to poll to find out if you had new posts to tweet. There’s naturally the potential time delay from posting… and also just the general inefficiency. We are not posting here all that often and don’t need the feeds checked all that much.

  3. My third concern was the issue of introducing yet another site in between this site and Twitter. Given Twitter’s API, it seemed logical that we could connect directly.

  4. By the time I got the site set up to provide OpenID, Twitter was experiencing some performance problems last Friday and the Twitterfeed.com site was also offline.

This last issue caused me to decide I had to solve the problem on our own server so that we aren’t dependent on another site.

A Google search brought me to the “Twitter Updater” plugin for WordPress which, on first glance, seemed to provide exactly what I was seeking. I followed the instructions, activated it for one of the blogs, filled in the credentials, posted a test post and……. nothing. No Twitter post. In further reading down the page, it became clear that the developer stopped further work on this plugin and in fact moved her blog from WordPress over to Drupal and so had no real interest in the plugin anymore. I tried a hack by another user, but it, too did not work.

Meanwhile a friend had recommended that I use Alex King’s great “Twitter Tools” plugin. I actually had it installed, but hadn’t really thought about it for purely posting to Twitter. The strength of the Twitter Tools plugin is really about taking your updates from Twitter and posting it to your blog (which the README clearly shows). However, in our case, we’re not going to be (or don’t expect to be, anyway) posting independently to twitter.com/voxeo. It’s just another publishing medium for us – a one-way publish out to the world of Twitter. So we don’t need to publish our tweets here because there won’t be any.

This is, however, the solution I ultimately used. I activated the plugin for one of the blogs on this site, configured it with our Twitter username and password and then changed the settings so that it was only publishing outbound to Twitter.

There was one change I did make to the PHP code. By default, every new blog post appears in your Twitter stream with the prefix “New blog post: “. However, since our Twitter stream is only new blog posts, this prefix is redundant and wastes some of our precious 140 characters! So I modified line 75 and 76 of “twitter-tools.php” from this: 

$this->tweet_prefix = 'New blog post';
$this->tweet_format = $this->tweet_prefix.': %s %s';

to this: 

$this->tweet_prefix = '';
$this->tweet_format = $this->tweet_prefix.'%s %s';

You can see the result now over on twitter.com/voxeo.

A couple of notes about this implementation:

  1. The good news is that this posts to Twitter as soon as we publish an article to a blog. No polling. No waiting. No reliance on a site in the middle (Twitterfeed). Just direct from our site to Twitter via the Twitter API.

  2. The good or bad news, depending upon your perspective, is that the plugin needs to be activated separately for each of your WPMU blogs. If you have a lot of WPMU blogs and all you want to do is take all the blog posts and post them to Twitter, you are probably far better off taking the Twitterfeed.com route and simply linking a site-wide RSS feed to a Twitter account. In our case, we don’t have a large number of blogs and while we anticipate adding a few more, we don’t expect to add a huge number. Activating/configuring this plugin is now something I’ll just add to my “provisioning checklist” when rolling out a new blog.

    Note that on the good news side, we do now have a much higher degree of control over precisely which blogs post to the Twitter.com/voxeo account. Because we have to manually configure it, we wind up having the flexibility to not configure certain blogs, so that their postings do not appear in the Twitter.com/voxeo stream. We also have the flexibility to configure a certain blog to post to a different Twitter account. That’s not something I see us doing, but we do now have the option, which we wouldn’t if we simply connected our “all blogs” RSS feed to a Twitter account.

  3. Do note that since we are using WordPress MU, after dropping the Twitter Tools plugin code into the “plugins” directory, I did need to go into the Site Admin page for the site and “allow” the use of the plugin for blogs on the site. After that, I could go into each individual blog, activate the plugin and then configure the settings.

  4. I have the plugin activated currently in four blogs and all are configured to post to the same Twitter account. Everything seems to be working fine.

So there it is… how I linked our WordPress MU blogs to Twitter to publish notifications to the Twitter account when we post new blog entries. Hopefully some of you out there will find this helpful.

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Posted in Twitter, WordPress MU | 12 Comments »