By way of Mashable, comes a nifty Twitter+blog integration widget from Dan Zaralla for WordPress blogs, TweetSuite.
You should stop reading at this point if you’re sick of hearing about Twitter.
OK then. TweetSuite allows you to track tweets about your blog posts. How you ask, since most links on Twitter use a shortening service to get under the 140 character limit?
According to Dan:
It currently finds mentions of the URL through the top 5 most popular URL shorteners on Twitter: Tinyurl, Bit.ly, Is.gd, Twurl, and SnipURL. I used cli.gs’s list of top shorteners to prioritize. To prevent it from running afoul of Twitter’s search API rate limits it functions via javascript.
Very cool stuff. Why should this matter?
Well, again assuming you use Twitter and blog, frequently a pair, this plugin will help you track commentary and distribution of your posts across Twitter. Nice.Dan’s been busy, he debuted TweetBacks just last week, and this week, he released TweetSuite, which includes a longer list of features and a settings manager within WordPress. TweetSuite includes:
- Server-side (no-JS or remote calls) TweetBacks
- ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack
- A Digg-like Tweet-This Button
- Automatic Tweeting of new posts
- A Most-Tweeted Widget
- A Recently-Tweeted Widget
- A My-Last-Tweets Widget
- A My-Favorited-Tweets Widget
All these features can be controlled in the TweetSuite admin panel in your WordPress Settings. I’ve implemented TweetBacks; if there are any, you’ll see them right below post content in the single post view. I decided against most of the other features, at least for now.
Impressive stuff, and Twitter agrees; at least Evan Williams, founder and CEO, thinks so.
I do have a few lingering questions. I know Dan’s working around the Twitter API limits, but it does seem to take forever to update, e.g. I tweeted his post introducing TweetSuite hours ago. It still doesn’t show in TweetBacks on his post.
Looking now at the list of TweetBacks, only links from Tinyurl appear, and my tweet used Is.gd, which may account for the problem.
I’m also unclear how to move the position of the TweetBacks within the single post; I’d prefer to see them in the comments area, but it’s not obvious to me what to put where in which file. In other words, I’m too lazy to figure it out on my own.
I doubt you’ve noticed, but I did turn off the FriendFeed WordPress plugin a few weeks ago. I liked it, but sometime after the move to WP 2.6, it stopped working. Maybe I’ll try it again on 2.7.
Anyway, I salute Dan, Glenn (the FriendFeed plugin writer) and all the other plugin authors out there. They’re filling big areas of need and building sweet features.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
Update: In case you’re wondering, I switched to Dan’s TweetBacks code and deactivated TweetSuite. Why? TweetSuite doesn’t seem to pick up any shortener other than TinyURL, and it’s pretty feature-rich. TweetBacks is JavaScript added directly to the template, so each single post page makes calls to Dan’s site. It is a bit slower, but is.gd gets recognized, which is a plus. We’ll see how this goes for a while.
Another update: I’ve switched us back over to TweetSuite. Why? The single page load time was pretty slow, what with the calls to Dan’s site; plus, I’m not in love with the idea of a random JS script that I can’t debug and review. So, back to TweetSuite; I’m hoping the other main URL shorteners will soon be supported.
TweetSuite is on GetSatisfaction!
http://getsatisfaction.com/tweetsuite/products/…
Trying to get support via comments on a blog post is painful.
Doesn't seem like Dan is monitoring Get Satisfaction, though. I'm not so worried about support; the weird thing is that the JS for TweetBacks seems to do a better job finding the tweet than the plugin does. Not sure why that would be.
Anyway, you get what you paid for, so I'm willing to wait.
Do NOT use TweetSuite, it will slow down your blog!
It is written improperly. It attempts to use the tr.im bookmarklet to shorten the URL (indeed the author didn't even have the courtesy to use the tr.im API). API like traffic for tr.im must use the API, that is what it is there for. Additionally it wouldn't work even if he had written it improperly because he doesn't understand how some URL shorteners such as tr.im work.
The author has refused to fix his wordpress plugin and remove tr.im. As a result tr.im is banning any traffic coming from a blog using this plugin. This will slow down your pageloads for several seconds before it times out on its connection to tr.im.
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