Monthly Archives: November 2010
Testing Twitter Blackbird Pie
We’ve enabled a really neat feature on WordPress.com recently. The ability to display tweets in all their glory as simple as pasting a link in your post as shown below.
This is made possible by the excellent Twitter Blackbird Pie plugin, which this post is a test of on myself-hosted blog (see update below). :)
This plugin is:
- a simple alternative to running a more complete plugin such as Tweet Import or Fresh from FriendFeed and Twitter (also interesting).
- an effective way of importing such data (though unstructured) since Twitter Blackbird Pie stores the HTML output of the tweet in a custom field.
- very easy to use as it supports shortcodes (with a GUI) and even inline
oEmbedembeds so you only have to paste the tweet’s URL on its own line for the import to work. - even SEO-friendly since the tweet is here as text, not as a screenshot as so many people do.
I’ve been considering running an import plugin forever but never did because ultimately, I don’t want all my tweets on my blog. This will likely work better for me because I just have to selectively post the ones I want. Bonus: it also works with other people’s tweets when I want to quote them.
Update: The implementation you see above is in fact the one on WordPress.com, since I have now moved this blog to it.
What we Can Learn from Procrastination
before we rush to overcome procrastination we should consider whether it is sometimes an impulse we should heed
via The New Yorker.
Press This… Now!
Press This is still one of my favorite WordPress features. The video shows its usage on WordPress.com but it works the same way in the self-hosted version.
See also:

