After looking at my rapidly growing library of tweets coupled with a definite twitter addiction I’ve decided to add a new section to the blog which will contain an archive of all my tweets. The reason? vanity mainly 🙂 That and the fact that I’m sure the up to the date info will be tasty food for GoogleBot to chomp on.
After making the decision to put my tweets in an archive section, I went searching for a solution. Alas, none could be found which would fit my idea – most of them seemed to just grab your tweets and automagically place them as a post on your blog. I didn’t really want that, as my blog articles tend to be a lot higher quality than my quite spammy twitter feed. So I decided that I would use a Page, and roll my own.
I haven’t really done any coding for WordPress, with the exception being minor tweaks to things – so had no idea where to start. After reading the codex and about 30 mins of web searching, I searched for two plug ins that I would need. The first most excellent Tweet Tweet – which really does all the hard work. It grabs all my tweets and saves them to a local database. Quite a bit of a time-saver there. The second was the incredibly useful WP exec PHP which allows php code to be embedded and run in pages. I had all the tools I need, so got coding.
After battling with the almost mysterious URL re-writing WordPress ships with, along with several heart stopping moments when I thought I had borked my install to such a degree I couldn’t get it back, I had the My Tweets section completed. All in all, about two and half hours work. But now I can sleep soundly at night knowing that even if Twitter deletes all my precious tweets, I’ll still have a back-up of them 🙂
If anyone is interested in a tutorial or some code or something, drop me a comment and I’ll see what I can do 🙂
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