At the beginning of the year, I added the right sidebar that contains content from my Twitter account. The motivation was to automatically capture tweets I make, most of which are retweets referring to articles I have read. I like that the content is automatically captured (although a lot ends up being redundant), but I do not like that it is in a different “stream” than my blog posts. All of the information is kept in sequence on the feed streams page, but that is not quite what I want. For instance, there is no way to comment here about any of those tweets, so for a while I have wanted a way to get tweets inlined in the blog feed.
Enter Blackbird Pie, which learned about yesterday from here. This provides a simple way to embed tweets into posts, keeping the links in the tweet active. For example:
[blackbirdpie id=”29646018950”]
The downside of this is that capturing the tweets is not automated, but given how I am pulling tweets onto this site and tweeting about posts here, maybe that is a good thing. Perhaps some day I will find or write something to implement the cross-posting logic I want, but for now it is not that big of a burden to do it manually.
Here’s the initial plan: I will start embedding tweets, but also will keep using Lifestream for the right sidebar and the feed streams page (I am too busy to adjust the site style right now anyway).