[Edit: Now that I have all of my widgets configured and things structured the way I want them, I discovered one or two flaws in what I originally posted — like mangled tweets in RSS feeds. I’ve included the revised tweak below the original.]

When I was looking for a good WordPress theme, I stumbled across Wu Wei by Jeff Ngan. It’s a beautiful theme he uses for his Equivocality site. What I loved about the home page was that he has a nice mix of blog posts and tweets — all complete with little twitter icons.

That triggered a Google search for something that would give me more powerful, but easy to use WordPress/Twitter integration. Twitter Tools is really packed with functionality, but there were just a few things that didn’t quite work the way I’d like them to. I really wanted the tweets in my blog to look like tweets.

I really like the way Twitter Blackbird Pie displays tweets, but that requires the tweet’s URL to be embedded in the post like this:

http://twitter.com/#!/twitter-user-name/twitter-status-id

A little digging through Twitter Tools code and changing a few lines of code, I now have a blog page that’s much closer to what I’m looking for.

If you’re using Twitter Tools to import your tweets to your blog, here’s how you can create a post that allows Twitter Blackbird Pie to display them the way your friends see them on Twitter:

Method #1:

• Open /wp-content/plugins/twitter-tools/twitter-tools.php and find the do_tweet_post function.
• The first line looks like this:
  global $wpdb;
  You’ll need to change that to this:
  global $wpdb, $aktt;
• A few lines down, you’ll see another line of code that looks like this:
  'post_content' => $wpdb->escape(aktt_make_clickable($tweet->tw_text))
  You’ll want to change that one to:
  'post_content' => $wpdb->escape('http://twitter.com/#!/' . $aktt->twitter_username . '/status/' . $tweet->tw_id)
• That’s it. Save your changes and you’re done.

This method results in a nicely formatted single post, but the tweets in your RSS feed and main blog page will have a bit of gibberish because of the special tags that get rendered. The next method will address that issue.

Method #2

• Complete all the steps outlined in method 1 above.
• To have a nicely formatted main blog page, you’ll need to add another element to the data array to set the post’s excerpt:
  'post_excerpt' => $wpdb->escape('<img src="{twitter-icon-url}" /> <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/' . $aktt->twitter_username . '/status/' . $tweet->tw_id . '">' . $tweet->tw_text . '</a>')
  Note: Either omit the twitter icon or replace {twitter-icon-url} with a full URL for the image you want to display on your tweets (example: https://www.brendaabell.com/wp-content/themes/suffusion/images/twitter/twitter-01.png).

My next challenge is finding a way to turn the #hashtags in my tweets into post tags. Stay tuned!