I've been testing the TweetSuite plugin for Wordpress, which is one of a number of tools that aims to better integrate blogging with Twitter. It has a great list of features and I'm excited to use it. But it's still in beta, so some features seem to work better than others. There hasn't been an update for a few months so, for the time being, if you want to use it, you should be aware of the problems. I'm detailing a fix for one. (The following applies to TweetSuite ver. 0.7).
TweetSuite acomplishes a few things:
-It automatically creates a Tweet on your Twitter account when you post to your blog (with an automatically generated tiny url). This works fine.
-It creates a link to allow your readers to tweetback your post. This feature has some problems. First, the tweetback links only seem to appear on the posts' permalinks, not the blog's home page. I'm not sure if this is accidental or by design. (This may have to do with the template I'm running, which I will test soon.) Second, the link is initially phrased 'Be the first to Tweet this post'. But even after several tweetbacks are created, that phrase stays the same. Related, there is a message that says 'No TweetBack Yet' which does not update, even after tweetbacks are created. I will look into creating a fix for this, if it's not too hard.
-It creates sidebar widgets that track various twitter feeds on your blog. I'm most interested in the My Tweets widget, which displays my personal Twitter stream. Out-of-the-box, I had a problem with it, which is that it only updated when I reset the settings in the Tweetsuite admin screen.
Fortunately, it turned out to be easy to fix this.
Fix to make TweetSuite 'My Tweets' widget update properly
-In a text editor, open the file 'TweetSuite.php'
-Insert the cursor just below the line that reads:
add_action( 'tweetsuite_5mins_hook', 'tweetsuite_5mins' );
(This should be around line 40.)
-Type the following:
add_action('plugins_loaded','tweetsuite_hourly');
-That's it!
For those who are interested, here's how it works. 'add_action' is a way to tell Wordpress to run functions at the time that certain actions happen. The first parameter after the parentheses specifies the action, in this case 'plugins_loaded'. That means, do the following function at the time that Wordpress loads plugins. The second parameter tells the name of the function to run, in this case 'tweetsuite_hourly', which you can see a little further down in the 'TweetSuite.php' file, around line 88.
It seems like the original intention was to run certain database updates on an hourly basis. But, for whatever reasons, there's some sort of problem with the time stamp, and they were never running at all. By inserting the 'add_action' line above, we tell Wordpress to do the updates every time plugins are loaded. In other words, before the page is generated, every time. This insures that the widget always has the latest Tweet.
I suppose this fix could make things slower, since now we need to interface with the Twitter API and update the database every time a page is generated. But unless your blog has very high traffic, it shouldn't be serious. And it really is important that Tweets show up in real time, otherwise, what's the point?
Overall, I love TweetSuite, and I look forward to the finished product.
UPDATE, 3/31/09
I've detailed several more TweetSuite fixes, including:
-Tweetback buttons appear on single pages, but not on posts on the blog home page.
-‘RetweetThis’ button doesn’t appear/creates a broken link
-Posts always say “Be the first to Tweet this post” and give a count of zero, even when posts have been ReTweeted
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blogging, tweetsuite, twitter
