Betwittered
A bunch of my friends have started using twitter, seemingly all at once. I think the whole status update part of it is pretty dumb, I just use it for posting interesting tidbits in under 160 characters. It’s nice because I text them in as well, which I guess would be less notable if I could send email with my phone, but I can’t. Adrian asked me how I got my twitter updates into my sidebar. When my response was longer than I expected it to be, I realized that it hadn’t been trivial and other people might be interested.
As of version 2.2, wordpress has sidebar widgets. You get to them by going to the “presentation” tab and then the “widgets” sub-tab. You can move around all the stuff on the sidebar, take things out, etc, as long as your theme is compatible. I think my theme was compatible, but if you have a custom theme or are a theme author, there are instructions. There’s an RSS widget that shows RSS feeds which I think it checks every hour or so. Getting that running is the first step.
The only problem is that the wordpress RSS reader doesn’t like certain RSS feeds. Or at least that was the case with my version of it, maybe it’s been fixed since 2.2.2. It likes RSS feeds from feedburner, so I set up all of the feeds I wanted it to display on feedburner and have the RSS widget read them.
The third thing, which is still sub-optimal is getting the right rss feed from twitter. I wanted it to be the last N things I’ve posted, but unfortunately twitter has some sort of time limit so things that are too old don’t show up in the feed even if they’re in the N most recent posts. It would be nice to get the rss feed from the twitter archives, but it’s not immediately obvious how to do that. Another tricky thing was getting the feed for just me, not for me+friends. Also on the wishlist is some way for people to comment on the twitters, which might involve getting a different feed from twitter again, but I’m not sure.