Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

It’s all very well writing new blog posts regularly, but once you’ve posted something how can you tell as many people about it as possible without too much effort? In particular, how can you easily tell all those followers that you’ve built up on Twitter?

Image by petesimon via Flickr

Well, if you’re using WordPress for your blog then a simple solution is to configure your blog so as every time you post something new a tweet is automatically sent out for all your followers to see. This tweet will tell everyone the title of your latest blog entry and will include a link they can click to come and read it.

So how is this done?

Step one is to install the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress. To do this, just download the ZIP file containing the plugin and then in your WordPress dashboard go to Plugins –> Add New. Click the Upload option near the top of the page and then browse to the location where you downloaded the ZIP file to. Click Install Now and then once it is uploaded to the server, simply click to activate the plugin.

Having installed the Twitter Tools plugin, you now need to configure it to work with your Twitter account. This involves getting hold of some technical sounding things like consumer keys and access tokens, but it’s pretty simple to do. Here are the steps you’ll need to take:

1. In the WordPress dashboard, click on Settings –> Twitter Tools.
2. Click the link for registering Twitter Tools as an application with Twitter.
3. When the page on the Twitter site opens up, log in with your usual Twitter login details.
4. You should now be on a page for registering a new application. If not, then the address to go to is: https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new.
5. Enter an application name. This is the name that will show up publicly on each tweet as the application that your tweet was sent from, so you’ll probably want to use something like “John’s blog” as the application name.
6. Enter a description such as “Twitter Tools for WordPress”.
7. Enter the URL of your blog in the Application Website box.
8. Enter your organisation or company name in the appropriate field if applicable.
9. Make sure Application Type is set to Browser.
10. Put the address of your blog in the Callback URL box.
11. Change the Default Access Type to Read & Write.
12. Enter the CAPTCHA code and then click Register Application.
13. On the next screen you will see your Twitter Consumer Key and Twitter Consumer Secret. Copy and paste these two strings into the appropriate boxes on your WordPress Twitter Tools Settings page.
14. Then, on the Twitter web page, click the button on the right of the screen called My Access Token.
15. Copy and paste the Access Token and Access Token Secret strings into the appropriate boxes on your WordPress Twitter Tools Settings page.
16. On the WordPress settings page click Connect to Twitter.
17. If the connection is successful, next make sure that the option “Enable option to create a tweet when you post in your blog?” is set to Yes.
18. Then set your chosen prefix for the automatic tweets – something like “New blog post”.
19. Make sure that “Set this on by default?” is set to Yes.
20. Ignore the remaining options and save your settings.

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