Webmaster
Use WordPress to Create a Searchable Archive of Your Tweets
“Once you put it out on the Web, it’s always exists.”
“Oh yeah, well then why can’t I find what I’m looking for?”
If you put anything of significance on Twitter or just want to keep a copy of everything for yourself, you’ll probably want to keep a copy of your Tweets. Between Twitter’s downtime or “Older tweets are temporarily unavailable.”, off-loading from Twitter seems best. Previously mentioned applications like Sharetronix or Status.Net allows you to establish a micro-blogging system running off your own server. That’s one approach but many people are on Twitter for one reason or another and don’t want to switch. A better setup would be to continue using Twitter as is but archiving the individual tweets. Here’s how I’m accomplishing that using WordPress 3.0.
Status.net and Sharetronix, a “Twitter” You Own and Control
Twitter has had phenomenal growth and reaches millions of people daily. From the outside looking in, it seems they were able to accomplish this while not following the traditional path of getting everything exactly right. Particularly recently, Twitter has a high rate of downtime and a high response time. Combined with the “Older Tweets are not available…” message, I looked into some of the free Twitter alternative services that you could host on your own server like Status.net and Sharetronix.
Implementing WordPress 3.0 Multisite Functionality
One of the most publicized new features of WordPress 3.0 was the merging of WordPress MU back into the main WordPress development thread. The MU features are expanded upon and are now referred to as ‘Multisite’. It makes it possible to host multiple WordPress sites with only one WordPress installation to administer. This sounds great for anybody that might be running multiple blogs. I looked into this because I had a thought in my mind to create another blog alongside 404 Tech Support where I could post more personalized stories and all the funny things I see across the Internet during the day.WordPress 3.0′s Multisite allowed me to accomplish that with minimal back-end maintenance. Here’s a quick run-down as to how it is accomplished.
Anthologize – A Promising WordPress Plugin That Turns Your Blog Into a Book
More than one WordPress-powered blog has made the leap into book format and many more are hoping to follow suit. A WordPress plugin under development just made the platform the perfect place to start if you’re an aspiring author. Anthologize is under development at the Center for History and New Media of George Mason University currently at version 0.3-alpha and it already allows you to export your blog posts to a number of eReader formats.
Anthologize development is helmed by Boone Gorges, a developer specializing in BuddyPress. As a WordPress plugin, Anthologize is simple to install. From your WP admin panel, just go to Plugins, Add New and do a search for Anthologize. You can then install it from there. You can also find it and manually upload it to your servers from the WordPress.org plugin site.
Once you have the plugin installed and activated, you’ll find a new entry on the left-hand column of your WP admin fittingly called ‘Anthologize. If you expand it, you’ll see some options and since this is your first look at Anthologize, you’ll want to create a new project.
Bing’s Webmaster Tools
Bing has announced on the Bing blog (and it’s corroborated on the Yahoo! Search blog yesterday) today that the testing with Yahoo! implementing Bing search results is underway. Of greater importance to webmasters and SEO experts, Bing is warning/encouraging webmasters to investigate how their site is showing up in search results using the newly updated Bing Webmaster Tools, also announced today.
During this testing phase, it’s important to look at how your site is showing up in search results on Yahoo! and Bing today, so you can assess if there are any tweaks you need to make or feedback you need to share with the team to make sure your site is accurately represented in Bing’s results.
In particular, now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots.
Onto the Next Theme
All weekend, I’ve been tinkering with a new theme here at 404 Tech Support. If you’ve visited over the course of the weekend, you’ve definitely seen it (and I apologize if my tinkering disrupted your visit). I’ve still got a small handful of changes I’d like to make but the majority of the installation is done. I’m enjoying it because it has made my site more responsive and introduced new features. For a reminder of what the old theme looked like, here’s your reminder.
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