Twitter is a great tool for interaction. However, it’s 140 character limit can often act as an obstruction in your thoughts. The stress is then on fitting the thought in the limit instead of getting the real meaning out.
WordPress, in it’s simple blog format, is a great blogging tool. You can quickly set it up for writing long blog posts with proper post title to get your point across. But some times, all you want to get across is a paragraph or a couple of lines. This model doesn’t fit in either WordPress or Twitter. What we need to do is to get WordPress to bend to the Twitter model yet remain a blog in a real sense. That way, we can post long tweets to your blog and have them reflect on twitter as well, driving traffic to your blog as well as getting your tweet across.
A point to be noted is that there are a lot of services that allow long tweets to be posted. From dedicated services such as twitlonger and XLtweet to services like BottleNose that have long tweets as a by-product, there are a lot of ways to tweet more than 140 characters. The reason I’m harping on using wordpress as a solution is because you, like me, probably have a blog setup and would like to drive traffic to it.
So, what can we do? How can we get WordPress to fit into the Twitter model? Is there a plugin or method to use WordPress in that way? There are many ways to convert your wordpress blog into a micro-blog, much like twitter, but those plugins do not allow the normal blog post functionality that one desires. Thus, the best way to tweet longer from wordpress is to use the post format called Aside. An aside is a small comment that is published exactly like a blog post but doesn’t need a title and can be of any length. That way, it becomes a long tweet that you can post to twitter.
Great, so I’ve posted on my blog, but how do I get it across to twitter? Well, out of the literally thousands of services, plugins and methods to push out a wordpress post to twitter and facebook, I recommend a simple service called dlvr.it. I was initially using twitterfeed but it was limited in more ways than one. So I looked around it seems that dlvr.it, with it’s advanced features, filters and multiple inputs and outputs with the amazing price of zero is perfect! So, I setup dlvr.it to accept my blog posts and forward them to facebook and twitter in such a way that if I post a normal blog post with a title and summary, the summary gets posted to those social networks but if I post an aside without a title, the text of the post gets posted to twitter only. This leads to a beautiful tweet with as many characters as twitter allows and then a link to my blog for further reading –
@nitinthewiz
Nitin Khanna
Some of the jailbreak tweaks I’m really waiting for are SBSettings, AnyLockApp, Activator and biteSMS. I… http://t.co/1Jw8GDY3 #LongTweet
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@nitinthewiz
Nitin Khanna
Some of the jailbreak tweaks I’m really waiting for are SBSettings, AnyLockApp, Activator and biteSMS. I… http://t.co/1Jw8GDY3 #LongTweet
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This system is really amazing! But then there’s one small problem. The mobility part of our lives allows us to post to wordpress from our iOS devices. But there is no app that I’ve found that allows me to specifically post an aside to wordpress. That is a problem because this facility is then only available to me through the desktop interface. Anyone who has a solution to this problem can please contribute to the following –
Plugin to set all Posts in a certain Category to a certain Post Format