Herself’s Webtools

All the major blogs on blogging were urging their readers to start Twittering a few months back. I had heard of Twitter, looked Twitter, but hadn’t yet done anything with Twitter. So I signed up for an account: Twitter.com/timestocome.

There it sat with nothing but the default tweet for over a month. I then attended a garden blogger’s convention in Austin and several garden bloggers said they were using Twitter on their blogs and quite happy about it. ( And I’m thinking I’m really behind the times if my fellow garden bloggers are out teching me. )

So things have finally quieted down and I had a chance to play with Twitter again. There are several plugins for Wordpress blogs and Twitter. I started using Twitter updater to post notices to my Twitter account when I have a new blog post, but it updated Twitter every single time a file saved, even if the post date was in the future and the post wasn’t completed.

I’m trying Twitter for Wordpress to publish my most recent Twitter in my sidebar on my personal blog.  So far it seems to be working well.

There is also a Twitter Tools plugin which allows you to send notices of your posts and also add tweets to your sidebar. I’m now using that to send tweets for new posts. I’ve found it also updates Twitter when you update an existing published post, but not for pages.  So that was a bit of a pain.  It also posted a link back to the Twitter Tools plugin page on each and every tweet.

As well as announcing new blog posts you can use Twitter from your cell phone with SMS. It is extremely simple. Go to Twitter->Settings->Devices and plug in your mobile phone number. Twitter then gives you a code, you send an sms to Twitter ( 40404 ) with the code and you’re good to go. Just sms to 40404 any thing you want posted on Twitter from then on.

Tweets are limited to 140 characters so like text messages you’ll need to be short and to the point.

Twitter might turn out to be useful for blogging, but I’ve yet to find a plugin that updates only new posts with out adding stuff to the tweet.  So for now I’ll be updating Twitter manually to announce new posts.  Twitter has badges for MySpace, Blogger, Facebook and TypePad.  Just follow the ‘Display Twitter on your website links’ while on Twitter to build a badge.

I’m also noticing that none of the profiles on the techy forums I post at have Twitter spots in user profiles.  So I’m thinking it’s not really mainstream yet.  At least among the geekiest of us.