When Monkeys Fly Out My A$$ OR My TweetThis Hack

I was recently reading Guy Kawasaki’s blog post on how he uses Twitter.   I was thinking, sure, Twitterfeed is great because it tweets my blog posts as me, but it would be even nicer if my awesome readers had a button to tweet my blog post as them in one click, i.e.  without the brain cell killing mousage/keyboardage of 1) shrinking the URL, 2) going to twitter and 3) copy/pasting the title. That’s a good thing in three ways:

  • More cred for you if someone else besides you tweets your stuff,
  • more potential reach,
  • your friend who tweets for you appears magnanimous and with it to all his followers.

It sounded like something that would be easy to automate  and useful to a lot of people, so I thought, there has to be a WordPress plugin to do that. Sure enough there is — Tweet This by Richard X Thripp.

Installation was a piece of cake: as a matter of fact, it was sticky carrot cake with cream cheese icing. Mmmmmm….. Oh sorry.

BirdWhen I first viewed Hot Dorkage with Tweet This installed I hated the default large bulging bird. I didn’t think people would understand that it means “Tweet This.”  I thought they would think, “WTF is that lame bird doing on a post about calculators?” Plus it clashed with my  background. So I configured small link at bottom instead of the bird.   There.  Now people can tweet about me with one click and I’ll get rich and famous.   AS IF! If that ever really happens you might just see monkeys flying out my orifice.

But suddenly a thought hit me.  The monkeys could never be cut loose unless I knew somebody tweeted my blog post.  I wouldn’t know unless I searched for each title, because the tweet is nothing but a shortened URL and a post title. That is too much work. I feel a hack coming on, but hopefully it’s a trivial one. To make it easier to search the tweet would have to contain something easy to search for.  And what’s the easiest thing to search for? All together now….. @Replies, of course.

I changed line 79 of the code in tweet-this.php in the function get_tweet_this_url
from
$url = 'http://twitter.com/home/?status=' .
to
$url = 'http://twitter.com/home/?status=via+%40tixrus:+' .

That causes the resulting tweet to be prefixed with via @tixrus: . Sort of ties up this great big ball of digital duct tape that I’m slowly weaving around myself.

I also suggested to Richard that he could make this a configurable option so I wouldn’t have to keep re-hacking it in with each update. But for now…. all goodness. So now… if anybody ever actually tweets a post:

  • The people who click in from twitter will know that the author of Hot Dorkage is tixrus on twitter. So much for consistent branding!
  • I’ll be able to find them.
  • And even if no one actually clicks them, it still makes you look cool on twitter if you have lots of replies.

OK…. If 100 unique real people tweet this post under their REAL TWITTER (defined as having at least 100 updates and at least 50 REAL followers) before Christmas, I will post a better orifice picture, how’s that?

22 comments to When Monkeys Fly Out My A$$ OR My TweetThis Hack

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