For those of you new to this thread, I was a very happy user of Alex King’s Twitter Tools WordPress plug-in – until it stopped working for my weekly digest posts. I tried several fixes but never got it working again. In my search for a simple and reliable replacement, I found Twitter Digest from Tim Beck (whalespine.org). TD borrows a lot from earlier versions of Twitter Tools for formatting tweets into the list items that make up the post, but it uses a much simpler method for compiling the digest, so it’s more reliable. The only disappointment was that TD only did daily posts and only handled 20 tweets. I had read about someone hacking TD to do weekly posts, but couldn’t find a fork and Tim hadn’t heard of it either, so I coded one myself. The code is still in a shakeout period on my blog, and Tim is reviewing it to roll into Twitter Digest. 

 Here are the key features (bold are changes to TD):

•  Your choice of a daily or weekly digest of up to 200 tweets:
  • Custom title, tags, and excerpt for the digest post
  • Specify the digest category (e.g. Digest)
  • Post tweets in chronological or reverse order
  • Select post author from all authorized users
  • Specify the time (and day of week for weekly posts) to publish the digest
  • Start right away – publish a weekly digest today of the past week’s tweets (no waiting for a database to cache a week)
• Simple, lightweight, reliable implementation:
  • Just a daily or weekly digest
  • No tweet sidebar, no tweeting from your blog
  • No automatic tweets when you post a blog entry
  • Support for just one Twitter account
  • Does not maintain a database of your tweets

You can see the output of the plug-in on my weekly Digest posts since 12/26/2009. I’ll post and tweet when the plug-in is generally available. If you have other ideas for features that do not increase the complexity of the plug-in please leave a comment here or at whalespine.org.

Happy New Year!

Related posts:

1. Integrating Twitter on my blog and website (and LinkedIn) – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
2. Integrating Twitter with My Website
3. Creating a News Digest for My Website
4. Twitter on my Website: Update
5. Are you on Glue? (Maybe you should be…)