So I spent the day tinkering some more with the site. What can I say? ‘Tis the season, or something like that. Actually, it was roughly 3 years ago around this same time I went live with this thing, so why not?
Anyway, there is now a Twitter widget over there on the sidebar (which seems like it’s getting crowded) which should display any Tweets by yours truly. That, of course, necessitated setting up a Twitter account. In the end, neither of those posed much of an issue.
But figuring out a way to connect the blog and my Twitter account was something more of a challenge, mostly because of the rather dizzying array of options. In the end, I went for what looked like the simplest, most complicated setup I could find.
First, I installed WP to Twitter so that posts here should automagically become Tweets over there. That process was pretty straight forward, though I’ll likely continue to tinker with some of the settings as I learn what the heck it’s doing. The documentation for the plugin is excellent and up-to-date.
The bigger challenge came about because of URL shortening. The WP-to-Twitter plugin will shorten URL’s for the tweets if configured to do so. With only 140 characters to work with, that seemed like a good idea. After a bit of research, I finally opted for the YOURLS approach, which means I’m hosting my own URL shortener (sorry, it’s just for me). Getting that set up took some time, but I was able to manage it- including setting up a database, users, passwords and all that fun stuff. The documentation provided for YOURLS is excellent as well, which was a tremendous help.
Once I had it working, the final trick was to enter the proper information into the WP-to-Twitter setup. I had some trouble getting path information correct for the shortener and then was tripped up by having the wrong shortening service selected. But once I got that straightened out, my second ever Tweet confirmed I’d finally managed it. Actually, it was more like my 10th tweet, as it took several attempts before I finally got all the configuration parameters correct. I did a little pruning on my Twitter stream to get rid of the extraneous ones.
Anyway, this here post should result in my 3rd ever Tweet, and after that blog tinkering should be stopped for awhile.