Twitter and wordpress

We are working steadily on getting our WP-MU site established for the university as well as recruiting new twitter users! The discussion over whether or not to have a university twitter account has been resolved in favor of trying it out. The next step is to figure out just how many ways we can use that rss feed generated by the account to bring dynamic content into a variety of other publication platforms.

We installed the most excellent twitter tools plugin by Alex King.  This plugin integrates twitter with wordpress in a variety of ways.  First, you can set it up to make all your tweets into full posts.  If you don’t want to do that, you can set it up as a widget and the posts will appear in the sidebar.  You can also set it up to automatically or on demand (via checkbox) send out a tweet announcing any posts you publish.

Of course you don’t have to do any of those things; you could simply display the rss feed in the rss widget, but with the handy-dandy auto installer provided by wordpress (point to the zip file and press the button!), what is holding you back?

Here is what a WP blog would look like with both a widget and posts generated by this plugin.

We are still discussing the best way to incorporate the twitter feed into the site.  In this particular case, we may elect to allow the plugin to generate a post for each tweet.  This is a low volume twitter account and the announcement-like content is suitable for blog posts.

Twitter tools is a very flexible and useful addition to your wordpress instance.  The main thing I still wish for is that there was some sort of separation between posts to make them more readable.  Either a line or perhaps alternating/tiger-stripe backgrounds for each post.

Now, we need a badge!