On Thursday I thought of a problem. I like the microblogging site Twitter, and sometimes I like to mention what my friends are talking about.
However, there is a problem. In order to preserve the status update (or “tweet”) as it’s known, you have to either copy and paste it - and get rid of all the nasty code that goes with it - or worse, take a screenshot of the tweet, save it, upload it and paste it onto your post.
Solution: After spending a couple of seconds on Google - that’sreally all you need - I discovered that there wasn’t anything out there that would do the job, so I thought I’d have a pop, and thus TwitterPaste was born.
It’s a ridiculously simple app: all you do is copy and paste the link to the tweet you want to embed (which you can get fairly easily), hit the big button and copy the code you get itno your blog.
Another problem: it doesn’t work on WordPress. Although this site is built on my new Byron CMS, any collaborative blogging projects I am involved in tend to be run on WordPress because it’s something bloggers are very familiar with...and it’s really good. The problem is however that, unless you’re editing in code view (which shows you all the “raw” HTML as apposed to the formatted text) all the code that TweetPaste generates gets stripped out.
Solution: The TweetPaste WordPress plugin. This simple one-file plugin generates the code needed to embed a tweet onto a page. And because it uses IFrames it deprocates so RSS readers should be able to display a link to the tweet, if they can’t display the IFrame.
And in other news, this is my first ever WordPress plugin! WOOT!
So now I can embed tweets into my blogs, and allow others to do the same. And all in less than 12 hours.
Oh, and to prove that it works, here’s me tweeting the fact:
