I'm Just Sharing

As some of you know, I’ve been using the WordPress plugin Twitter Tools for almost a year. I found it to be a great program to set up how I wanted it to send my blog posts to Twitter, and it was the only plugin I could find at the time that would let me post-date my posts and still automatically go out.

Then some of you saw my post a few days ago talking about twitter plugin changes that are on the way, that actually have been on the way for months but most of us hadn’t heard a lot about it. As it pertained to Twitter Tools at least, suddenly you had to go into Twitter and set yourself up as a developer, each individual blog, and get these codes for the program to continue working. I had written the WordPress people about it and they didn’t offer enough help for me to be able to get it right.

Well, if you paid attention to the comments on that post, you’ll see that my friend Chris, a super techie, offered instructions on how to get it done. Man, talk about nick of time type of stuff! However, it might be difficult following along with the comments. I’ve now done it 3 times for my 3 blogs; I can tell you what you need to do to get it done right.

First, go to your Twitter page, then go to Settings. Once in Settings go to Connections. After that, look to the right of the page where it says Developers, and click on the link at the end of that little paragraph. You might not have anything on this next page, but you’ll see a link at the bottom left that says “Register a new application »”; click on that.

Now you’re on the page where you’ll register your blog as a new application. By the way, I’m not sure if you’ll have other plugins you use with Twitter than you’ll have to do the same thing for, but for Twitter Tools, this is definitely how you go about it all.

The first thing is asks for is an image; you don’t have to do this ever, since you’re the only one who’s going to see it, but you can if you want.

Next it says Application Name. This should be the name of your blog, but it can be anything. With one of my blogs it said someone was already using the name, so I had to modify it slightly.

Next is the Description box. Just write something short and sweet in there on what your blog is about.

Next is Application Website; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.

Next is Organization; I left this empty.

Next is Website; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.

Next is Application Type, and it should be defaulted to “Browser”; if not, that what you want to select.

Next is Callback URL; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.

Next is Default Application Type; this one is important because it’s defaulted to “read only”, and you want “read and write” instead.

Next, you want to check the box next to “Use Twitter for Login“.

Finally the captcha; get it right, although it will let you do it again if you get it wrong; I hate those things!

Once you hit save, if it’s acceptable you’ll see a message telling you so. You’ll be on a new page, and you’ll have your first bit of information to put into your Twitter Tools settings on your blog. If you’ve updated it, open it up under Settings in your control panel on your blog. Once you have it open, you’ll see it asks you for a Consumer Key and a Consumer Secret. Both of those are on the Twitter page you’ve just been taken do. It’s best to copy and paste it in so you don’t mess it up.

After that, you’ll see you need information to fill in for Access Token and Access Token Secret. To get that, you go to this link, http://dev.twitter.com/apps and it will take you to a page where you’ll see the “application” you just registered, which will be your website. Click on it and you’ll go to another page where you’ll see a list of items to the right. Click on the one that says My Access Token and it’ll take you to the page with the information you need for the two items above.

Once you’ve put that in click Save, and if the plugin says it connected to Twitter you’re done with all the hard stuff, and just need to customize your settings based on what you want to do.

And there you go; whew! It turns out to look a lot more difficult than it really was. And I can’t think Chris enough for the help; you da man!

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