Andy Laub

So at some point this week I apparently lost my mind, because I signed up for Twitter. If you don’t know what that is, then you’re probably not reading this because you haven’t yet gotten on the internet or maybe even a computer. But that’s beside the point. The point is, I’m on yet another social internet thing.

But why Twitter? The other day I went to post a blip. But it was not a link, as they traditionally have been; more of just a state of mind sort of thing. And I thought “this would be apropos for Twitter.”

Of course, nothing ever comes easy. It wasn’t hard finding a plugin that suited my needs, but my laziness in keeping my WP install up to date came back to bite me in the ass. I’ve been running 2.0 since, well, too long; because it worked for me, I never bothered to follow the updates. Which meant that to make the little birdie happy, I had to set aside a larger chunk of time to get WP up to snuff. And by up to snuff, I mean, WP 2.1 (they’re now at 2.3). So I did that and fixed the custom field junk that had changed between 2.0 and 2.1 (fortunately I had dealt with it on another site months ago).

Having done that, it was time to actually install the plugin. Doing so turned out to be hassle-free, once I had the right version, but the output wasn’t quite to my liking. The default is to truncate the Twitter post and make that the title; I wasn’t thrilled with the post slugs that resulted in, since my general blip posts don’t have titles at all and therefore are just assigned numbers. I can’t fault the logic in this design, though; it’s easier to figure out how to get rid of it than it is to implement it. Case in point: line 196 of twitter-tools.php

, 'post_title' => ''

Now that Twitter was producing title-free posts, I turned my attention to the other hurdle; creating a link back to the original Tweet. I did some searching and came up empty-handed; fortunately I had the good sense to see that Twitter Tools adds the post ID as post meta, and from there it can easily be called from the WP templates themselves. Fortunately, that solved my other problem as well: how to get the Twitter link to only show up on Tweet posts.

I’m pleased with the entire result, as it’s exactly what I was looking for, now the question becomes whether or not I will continue to use Twitter in the first place.