geoff manning » twitter

Twitter: Hashtag Etiquette

Geoff — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:02:14 +0000

Nearly every Tuesday or Thursday, and sometimes randomly, someone tries to start a new Twitter meme by using the #tpt hashtag for a variety of things: Third Person [Tue/Thu], TwitPic [Tue/Thu], and others. The Twitter Poker Tour has been using the #tpt hashtag for over a year and it is counter productive to both the TPT and the new meme to share a hashtag as it causes confusion.

What is the etiquette for dealing with hashtag “pirates”. Should the burden be on the person who would like to start the new meme to research and choose an unused hashtag? A simple Twitter Search for #tpt shows the hashtag is alive and in use. Or should the burden be on the current “owners” or users of the hashtag to ask that they pick a new hashtag?

What are your thoughts on this?

TweetSuite Errors and Troubleshooting

Geoff — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:54:53 +0000

I ran into more issues getting this to work properly so I switched to another TweetBack plugin. I like the TweetSuite implementation better so I will try to get it working on another one of my blogs (this one perhaps!). Thanks for reading!

I was having a lot of trouble getting TweetSuite to work properly on the Tweet Vegas website. After some tweaking and researching I finally got it to work. Here is a list of issues/pointers to keep in mind while integrating it.

“Tweet This” button will only appear on posts published after the plugin was installed. There is a table called WP_ShortURLS which is populated with the different iterations of the short urls for the post (bit.ly, tinyurl, etc). The records are inserted upon the publishing of the post. Therefore previous posts will not be available in this table. You can unpublish then republish your post to see it work.
You need to set the permissions on the TweetSuite plugin folder to 777 or else the dynamic “Tweet This” image cannot be created.
I had an issue where the “Tweet This” image wouldn’t show up when there were zero tweetbacks. I added this line to rt-gif.php

if($count<1) { $count="0"; }

I added it directly after line 4. Your results may vary, this was an issue I came across. There is likely a more elegant solution, but it worked for me!

If you do not set your twitter handle in the TweetSuite settings, but leave the default “admin” then your tweetback will default to appending “from @admin” at the end. You can see this in action here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=from+%40admin

Hopefully this will come in handy as you install TweetSuite.

URL Encode a Twitter Status Message

Geoff — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:18:26 +0000

You may have seen Twitter contests where to enter you need to “Click Here to Retweet” a certain message. Here is how it is done!

You can add a custom message to the Twitter URL as a link like so:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Custom%20Message%20Here

When you click it, you will be brought to your Twitter home page (if you are logged on already) and the status box will now say “Custom Message Here”. Obviously you can put in whatever text you wish to be displayed.

What do you do if you want to put spaces, hashtags, slashes and other special characters in your message? You can use an URL Encoder like this to do the work for you.

When you encode the URL, be sure to append it to http://twitter.com/home?status=

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