With the widespread adoption of Twitter, has come the need for short URL’s.  Unfortunately, the providers of those short URL’s are often not terribly financially stable.  Recently, tr.im was in the news for going under, and then being miraculously saved shortly afterward.  There was a lot of outcry, because people were unhappy to see those links “go dark”.  Bit.ly and others have banded together to create a backup of their own links, in case something happens to them.

WordPress.com users now have a different solution available to them now.  Automattic has launched an internal shortening feature:

WP.me is similar to what we’ve been using at Blueprint – we purchased the shorter domain name bpds.us so that we could build our own “retweet” button that linked to our own domain, and included our @blueprintds twitter as the source of the tweet.  Besides being a shortcut around  building a plugin just to interface with a shortening service’s API, it also guarantees that we won’t have to worry about a shortening service going under – the links will live as long as we do.

Shortening the url’s is pretty simple – it’s just a link to http://bpds.us/?p=<?php the_id(); ?>, placed in the single.php template. We could be more advanced and base_encode the ID, and build a plugin to handle those URL’s, so that they looked more like Bit.ly or tinyurl.com links. It’s not really worth the effort, since it would at best save 2 characters, and the URL’s are for copy/pasting, not typing.

If you don’t want to build your own short URL’s, WP.me will be extended to all wordpress users in the near future.

tour resource center

Here at Blueprint Design we have been trying to figure out which WordPress Twitter plugins we should use to integrate our twitter account. Here are the results of our research. Look at the end of this post to see what we picked to use. Please note all of these plugins are compatible up to WordPress 2.7.

1. Twitter Tools - This plugin creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress. Alternative versions by other contributors: Kevin De Mulder: TwitterComments – updates Twitter when a comment is posted on your blog. Jonathan Dingman: Twitter updater with support for tinyurl. Ceritium: Twitter updater that uses short url with your domain name. James Cridland: Bugfix for Twitter updater if it doesn’t work for you.
2. Twitter for WordPress - Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog. Features: Simply, Customizable, Widget ready, Uses WordPress resources (no extra files needed), No options page (yes, it’s a feature), Detects URLs, e-mail address and @username replies, Multiple widgets (Thanks to Michael Feichtinger)
3. Twitter Updater - The Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post. You can specify the text for the updates, and also have the option to turn the auto update on/off for the different post actions in the admin panel.
4. Tweetsuite - TweetSuite adds a server side fully-featured TweetBacks service, complete with a Digg-style “Tweet This” button at the top of each post, a “Retweet This” button for each TweetBack, widgets for your sidebar, and the ability to automatically update Twitter with your latest blog entries.The self-explanatory sidebar widgets (you can customize which ones you want to display) include a Recently Tweeted widget, My Last-Tweets widget, Most-Tweeted widget, and My-Favorited Tweets Widget. That’s a lot of widgets, and they all serve very different, but useful purposes for super-tweeters who want to easily display relevant Twitter content to blog visitors. My personal favorite is the Most-Tweeted widget, which works in the same way as standard Popular Posts widgets, displaying your blog entries that get the most Twitter love in your sidebar. Source
5. WP Twitip ID - This plugin takes the pain out of adding another field to your comment form for users to enter their twitter username to be displayed as a link to follow them via their twitter page. WP Twitip ID functionality: Adds an extra field to the comment form for user to enter their twitter username, Echo out the twitter id associated with the comment being displayed, Echo out a html link pointing to the users twitter page using “Click Here To Follow Me On Twitter”, Display link as an image, Ouput just the @ username, Return the twitter id as a variable to be used by php, Display html before the extra field, Display html after the extra field, Add a class name to the extra field
6. Official Twitter Widget - Official Flash or HTML javascript codes that display badges showing what you are posting on Twitter. Available directly through the twitter site.
7. Twitthis - TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.
8. Twitt-Twoo - Twitt-Twoo is a simple little plugin that will allow you to update your Twitter status right from your blog’s sidebar. AJAX takes cares of the hard work, and means that your page doens’t even have to reload, allowing for quick and easy status updates.”This is definitely the most aesthetically-pleasing Twitter plugin for WP to date, but it’s a shame I can’t use it as my host is running PHP4 not 5!”
9. Sociable - Sociable is a plugin which adds social media buttons to your posts, and does so easily, and beautifully.
10. Lifestream - Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites. Features: Unlimited number of feeds. Stores entire feed history, not just the last week or two. Extendable via a base PHP class. Easily add your own feed types with very little PHP code. Customizable display using stylesheets. Allows grouping of events to cutback on the daily feed spam. Localization ready! (Email us translations) Daily digest available to summarize your activities. Efficient! Built on scalable database structures so it won’t bog down your website. View a live demo of LifeStream.
11. Twitme – Lets you ignore posts in a given category so that if you import posts to a special category so it would not flood Twitter. This new option also allows you to have one category on your blog lets say “Twitter friends” and you could tell Twitme to dont send posts from all the other categorys except those in “Twitter friends”. In that case you would mark all the categories to disallow except the “Twitter friends” category.
12. Twitpress - Submits a user definable tweet to your twitter account notifying any twitter followers or friends that a new blog entry has been published on your blog (or an existing published entry has been edited). Supports inclusion of a permalink to your blog posting in the tweet.
13. Birdfeeder - This plug-in serves one purpose and that is to tweet published posts. It doesn’t do anything other then tweet. It tweets in this format: [your message] [post title] [short url].
14. Tweetbacks - People are talking about your posts, and not only in the comments to your post. A lot of that conversation is happening on Twitter, and now, you can take that conversation right back to your blog! This plugin imports those tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.
15. MyTwitter - MyTwitter allows users to display their recent Twitter status updates (tweets) on their WordPress site and update their status through the Options page. Includes customization options including number of recent twitters to display, formatting options, and stylesheets. It can be called as a function or used as a widget.
16. TwitURLs - Widget that displays currently popular links that have been tweeted.
17. Tweetroll - A smart badge that shows your Twitter details and who you’re following on Twitter. It shows your friends’ avatars and invites your readers to come and follow you too.
18. NewsTweet – Set a keyword or phrase and NewsTweet constantly pulls twitter posts containing that word or phrase. Useful for bands or anyone with a specific focus for their blog. NewsTweet uses AJAX and the Twitter API so your content stays fresh without the need to refresh the page.
19. SiteTweet – sitetweet allows webmasters to post immediate messages on Twitter about specific behaviors on their site. Usually installed on strategic pages, you can configure sitetweet to send a special message when a user performs a certain action on your site. You can use Twitter’s options for private posts in case you want to control who follows your login.
20. TweetMeme Button – easily allows your blog to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been retweeted throughout twitter.
21. Simple Twitter Link – simply returns a URL – this URL is a link to Twitter with your post/page URL within it. It even uses TinyURL to make the link passed to Twitter even more convenient.
22. Twitter Badge – Official javascript codes that display badges showing what you are posting on Twitter.

WordPress Twitter Plugins We Choose

23. Twitterfeed - Posts your blog updates to your twitter account. Login to twitterfeed using your OpenID, provide the URL for your blog RSS feed, and how often to post to Twitter.

24. Twitter Widget Pro - This twitter plugin is a sidebar widget that handles Twitter feeds. It’s true that you could just point and RSS widget at one of the Twitter feeds, but you end up with the whole tweet as a link, @replies don’t function, etc. Twitter Widget Pro properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing, feeds that include friends or just one user, and can even display profile images for the users. It’s set up like the RSS widgets, so you can have as many of as you want on your sidebars.

After long tedious testing here are the plugins we choose. Although there are many solutions like TwitterTools which integrate both the ability to show your tweets in a widget on our sidebar as well as posts from your blog to twitter we started by adding Twitterfeed to our site which is setup and configured from their site. After that since it was already setup we started searching for a plugin just to display our twitter feed. Twitter Widget Pro stood out from the rest for having a rss icon link to the feed as well as a direct title link (shown as “Follow Us On Twitter” on our page) to our twitter page. Installation was quick and simple and there you have it could you ask for anything more. Our needs were fairly simple. The other plugins above in the post are great for more advanced functionality.

Here’s a list of link of sites we seen in September:

http://outlawdesignblog.com/2008/30-websites-that-feature-a-hand-drawn-style/
“In the past 5 years we ’ve seen an increasing trend of designers using a hand drawn style on their websites. Here are some great examples of the use of a hand drawn style in web design.”

http://www.smashingapps.com/2008/09/10/39-masterpieces-of-creative-advertisements.html
“I believe that strong advertisement is a fastest way to convey the message to the audience and if they are attractive as become inspiration for others so it ’s more useful. Sometimes they are just an advertisement but some companies works very hard to make their promotional / advertisement campaign very unique, striking and successful.”

http://justcreativedesign.com/2008/09/09/top-7-most-overused-techniques-elements-used-in-graphic-design/
This is a great list of over used design techniques. “Is all design looking the same too you? Are you following graphic design trends subconsciously?”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10046206-26.html?part=rss
Twitter got a face lift.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-ruin-a-web-design-the-design-curve
“ As a professional web designer I’ve noticed a consistent trend in the majority of the projects I’ve worked on: The more time that is spent dissecting, analyzing, and critiquing a design by the wrong kinds of people the worse that design gets. The same trend applies to the number of people involved in the design process.”