Posting to Twitter, Take 2

By Jake • January 26th, 2009 • 4 Comments

Let's see how twitterfeed works.Last week, I started posting tweets to theappslab Twitter account. That didn’t last very long.

The plugin I used stopped working shortly thereafter; initially, I thought it might be a conflict with TweetSuite, which I’ve found to be disappointing so far (and have turned off, for now anyway).

But even with TweetSuite out of the picture, I couldn’t get the tweets flowing again. Rich seemed to think it might be related to PHP on the host. Anyway, more effort than I care to spend or have him spend.

I was reminded today of twitterfeed, which Eddie uses (or used to anyway) for publishing OraNA content, and I’ve just finished the setup.

So, ideally, this post will eventually get posted to Twitter. We’ll see.

Regarding TweetSuite, even though I like the idea, i.e. tracking all the mentions of a blog post on Twitter by searching the primary link shorteners, it’s just not ready for primetime yet. For example, I was only ever able to see TinyURL-based tweets, not any other shortening service. I like the idea and the implementation, but the execution seems to be in flux.

TweetBacks are more accurate, pulling from TinyURL and is.gd correctly, but because the implementation is a Javascript code snippet, each page has to make calls to Dan Zarella’s servers, which can’t be good for either side. Plus, I’m not in love with the idea of adding random Javascript to every page.

So, when TweetSuite irons out its issues, I’ll happily turn it back on, and until then, anyone have suggestions for other ways to integrate Twitter or track blog post references there?

Find the comments.


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  • http://awads.net Eddie Awad

    I used twitterfeed for a long while. Then recently I switched to using FriendFeed to automatically post OraNA.info to Twitter. I noticed that using FriendFeed is more reliable than using twitterfeed.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Again with a useful blogging tip. I didn't know FF did that, and I keep noticing new cool features. I should really give it another go, but I'm so tied to Twitter. How did you make the transition, or do you spend equal time on both?

  • http://awads.net Eddie Awad

    Like you, I mainly use Twitter. For OraNA.info, I created http://friendfeed.com/orana and added the orana feed. then from the FF Account Settings, I set up feed publishing to twitter account http://twitter.com/orana That's it. It's a set and forget.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Awesome tip. I think I'll switch over to our FF account and dump the extra service. Thanks.