As my blog is being listed on http://www.dworld.pl/Blogsfera (and for other obvious reasons) I didn’t want all my tweets to be translated “1 to 1″ to plain old blog posts since this would cause each of my tweets (which can be silly sometimes (but quite rarely!)) to land on dworld, which they obviously shouldn’t as it’s only an place for Java/Development oriented posts. Also I’d rather they’d take less space, and would skip all the categories/tags – it’s all in the tweet, so why repeat it again and again?

So… let’s start by importing tweets into wordpress. There’s an great plugin for that, and it’s called Tweet Import by skinju. Just install it and set it up to fetch your tweet’s at an regular basis. Ok, we’re done with step 1 – but neither are the current tweets smaller or ommitted in the rss feed. Let’s start by filtering them out from the rss feed:

Open up the file /wp-content/themes/default/functions.php and go to the end of the file, we’ll add an filter here. Please note that in step 1 you should have created an “twitter” category all tweets should be marked with. Let’s assume this category has an ID of 131, then the following code would do the filtering for us:

It’s a very nice trick, and it’s explained more in detail here. The code is really simple, so no explaining here and let’s go and tune our view (yup, the RSS feed is already fixed!).

To setup our view to work a little different for tweets than for posts, well have to edit: /wp-content/themes/maze/index.php so open it up in your favourite editor and add such an if statement inside an post’s while statement:

Ok, with this done let’s write the else part…

(You can complain about the in line css styling if you want later, I know it’s bad but this wordpress theme is a mess anyways… ;-)) Let’s have a look at the more important parts of this code part. You’ll notice that I’m using some weird get_post_meta() function. It’s an method that fetches additional information that each post CAN but doesn’t have to have. And as the TweetImport plugin does fill an post with a lot of useful tweet data, such as post time and tweet url – that’s what I’m fetching here. The rest should be quite self explanatory, there are bit’s of hardcoded “ktosopl” in there but hey – it’s just my blog and I’m a busy person ;-)

Hope you found this post interesting and maybe you’ll implement the same thing on your blogs…? :-)
Cheers!

PS: Oh, and if your interested in talking on one of your upcomming JavaCamps – feel free to contact me or anyone from the java.pl team, we’re looking forward to hearing from you. The nearest meeting will probably be organized around 23′th or 6′th…

:syntax on

Whoa, 2 words, not 2 letters like usually! Thats pretty long for vim ain’t it? ;-)