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WP-Tweetback

• Introduction
• Installation
• Bugs, Feature Requests
• Changelog
• Download
• Closing Words

Introduction

Tweetbacks

Tweetbacks were “introduced” by Rachel Cunliffe:

Bloggers will start to add “Tweetbacks” to their blog posts. The simplest version will show the number of people who have tweeted this post (including all reverse engineered tinyurls). Tweetbacks are not yet available.

Options will include:

• Showing what tweeters are saying about the post
• Replies to those tweets from others
• Showing who is tweeting the post
• Showing the tweeters’ avatars
• Ordering tweeters by Twitter influence
• Mixing tweets in with comments, rather than displaying them separately

This plugin

This plugin creates much of the functionality above. The non-striked parts are already implemented. Please have a look at the installation page to get some more help on the plugin, its not hard to use at all.

Acknowledgments

The original version of this Plugin was coded by Florian Holzhauer and can be found at http://tweetback.holzhauer.it/. Because there are some bugs in the original plugin and the author is to busy to work on it, i have recoded the plugin and fixed (some of?) the bugs.

The original version documentation was written by Malte Dietrich.

Installation

Description

This plugin scans twitter for links to your blogposts and inserts found tweets as a comment.

Management summary

Copy the plugin into wp-content/plugins. Activate it in the Plugins menu and configure it within the Settings/Tweetback menu. Have a coffee.

Installation (Detailed)

Make sure your blog is at wordpress version 2.7, php is at least at 5.2 and Mysql is at least at version 5.0. Download the plugin, unzip it and copy it into your plugins-directory at wp-content/plugins. You can also install tweetback directly within the plugin-section of your blog, just use the path to the zip-file.

Once copied, you can activate your plugin as usual in the plugins section of your blog. Now you started tracking tinyurl-links to your blogposts.

If that is all you need, you can stop here and have a coffee.

Configuration

However, you have a little more options to configure, if you like: In the Settings menu now appeared the Tweetback section. There you can include more URL shortening services, right now we support is.gd, bit.ly and twiturl.de. We will add more services, however we prefer tinyurl.com right now for their convincing API.

After a tweet was posted, it can take up to 15 minutes to appear on your blog. We are using http://search.twitter.com and we don’t want to overload it, so please be patient.

Please note that we can only track the pure post-link, not links to specific comments, so if somebody points out a specific comment on your blog, you will not be able to notice it with tweetback. Also, generic links to your blog, not to a specific post, won’t be noticed either.

Also, this plugin does not work with Intense Debate and probably won’t cooperate with other comment-assembling plugins.

Bugs, Feature Requests

Known Bugs:

• Needs a nice uninstall routine
• Needs auto update functionality, too
• Tweetback Counter does not update its count if a tweetback is deleted in the admininterface or database

Feature Requests:

• Implement comment_type=’tweetback’ to make life for template developer easier

Submit Bugs, Feature Request and similar stuff at Get Satisfaction. Please do never forget the Debug Info from the Tweetback-Page in the admininterface (Settings->Tweetback), most bugreports are just plain useless otherwise. Thanks a lot!

Changelog

2009-07-16

• First alpha version released

Download

wp-tweetback.zip

Closing Words

Special thanks to Florian Holzhauer and Malte Dietrich for giving me the admission to enhance the plugin and the documentation.