Fun With Twitter – Speedlinking and Sideblogging via Twitter Tools

Twitter! It’s addicting isn’t it? It can also save you some time if you’re interested in Speedlinking, or provide an easy way to Sideblog.

How? Using Alex King’s amazing plugin Twitter Tools. If you want to get the most out of Twitter blog-wise, you should definitely check-out this WordPress plugin. It does a lot, including Twittering your blog posts and displaying your latest Tweets.

Before we continue, install the Twitter Tools plugin, and configure your login information. If you use Twitter for personal uses, as well as for speedlinking/sideblogging, then you may want to create a secondary account. If you use the Twhirl client to post Tweets, then you’re in luck. It can easily post to more than one Twitter account.

Sideblogging With Twitter

This one is easy. Just add the <?php aktt_sidebar_tweets(); ?> template tag to to your sidebar template to display your most recent Tweets. If you use sidebar widgets, then you can just hop on over to the Widgets page and drag the Twitter Tools widget to your sidebar.

That’s it. Now you can post your sideblog entries to your Twitter account, and they will be shown in your blog’s sidebar.

Speedlinking With Twitter

Twitter Tools has a feature that can post a frequent digests of your Tweets. By setting this up correctly, you can essentially speedlink using Twitter. You lose a little control if you do this instead of compiling the list manually, but it could potentially save you a lot of time.

Just tell Twitter Tools to post digests of your Tweets, and set the post title as “Speedlinking,” or whatever you want to call your Speedlinker posts, plus the date.

Personally, I prefer to do my Speedlinking manually, but you may prefer this method.