Automatically Posting Movable Type Entries to Twitter

By Maarten Schenk on February 17, 2010 11:14 PM | 4 Comments | No TrackBacks |
A great way to bring in new visitors to your Movable Type blog is to automatically post the titles and links of your entries to Twitter.  Not only will you stimulate your followers to click through to your latest and greatest entry, but also people happening to see your tweet via Twitter Search might come by.  So what is the easiest way to do this?
You can install Ian Fenn's MT-Twitter Plugin, but that assumes you have the right type of access to your server and that you have the knowledge needed to install plugins.  Also, I'm not sure it works under MT 5 (I haven't actually tested this, but if you do, let me know in the comments).

But by far the easiest way is to use any of the many RSS to Twitter services that are out there.  Simply enter the URL of your blog's feed and some info about your Twitter account, and off you go.

This blog also has a twitter feed: @movabletips, and it is automatically filled with links to the most recent entries via Twitterfeed, which scans this feed every half hour.

And yes, his means tweets go out with (potentially up to) half an hour of delay, but I found that one of the advantages of working like this is that you usually still have time to fix any typos in the headline before the tweet goes out.

Categories:

No TrackBacks

TrackBack URL: https://www.movabletips.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/22

4 Comments

Rob Kenny | February 22, 2010 11:28 PM | Reply

Maarten, another Twitter plugin you could use is my HashTag plugin (http://www.composing-stick.net/projects/hashtag/), it allows you to automatically add hash tags to your tweets, either predefined or dynamic based on your entry or page tags, it will also tweet scheduled posts and pages.

Sheila Lennon | February 27, 2010 3:22 PM | Reply

I have no dog in this race, but our experience with getting our posts out to Twitter may be useful to others.

Twitterfeed got our feed out for a long time, but has some big drawbacks for us, too.

Its inability to tweet scheduled posts defeats the purpose of scheduling. (Why schedule an entry you can't distribute?)

Sometimes our feed would just stop. Helpful Mario at Twitterfeed found that one of our bloggers had manually set the date a month ahead when he published, and Twitterfeed wouldn't publish any more entries until it found one dated after that -- next month. The only fix was to kill the entry and then kill our feeds, set them up again from scratch and wait for them to be approved, which took several hours.

I asked bloggers to let me know when they'd advanced the date, promising amnesty, and let them know that if they just had the hour wrong it would be better to wait it out.

Finally since, we're a news organization, we need realtime tweeting of our main news blog's breaking news.

We're switching to Rob's plugin, which I've tested on a dev install. It tweets scheduled and manually published entries in realtime. It can see if your entry tags match existing hashtags on twitter and add those hashtags to your tweets if they do.

This is all configurable, and the default can be overridden for any post.

It's a good upgrade from Twitterfeed.

women | April 18, 2013 6:06 AM | Reply

I'm impressed, I have to admit. Seldom do I come across a blog that's both educative
and entertaining, and let me tell you, you've hit the nail on the head. The issue is an issue that too few men and women are speaking intelligently about. I am very happy that I found this during my hunt for something concerning this.

Leave a comment