Blogathon 2009: To WordTwit or not to WordTwit?

So I hadn’t tweeted announcements of my Blogathon blog posts for fear of totally spamming the hell out of my Twitter, but everyone else seems to be doing it — and in fact, are surprised that I’m not. So what the heck, let’s do this.

I’m told WordTwit is the “dear Twitter: I posted on my blog” WordPress plugin of choice, and it’s certainly highly rated enough! I hadn’t realized it was codeveloped by fellow Blogathon Vancouver-er Duane Storey, but that just means I can huck something across the room at him if I need help, right?

I definitely like that installing plugins on WordPress is a lot quicker and easier than installing modules on Drupal. The two are apples and oranges, really, but it sure is a pleasant change.

So it’s installed, activated, and now I just have to turn it on. Aaaaand, done. Neat.

One handy feature is that it can optionally use your own server as a URL shorterner service rather than something like bit.ly or TinyURL. Sadly, “catherineomega.com” is not exactly short.

While I was writing this post, Karen Fung brought up a good point: how to include the #blogathon hashtag at the end of the tweet?

Simple: in the Settings panel, you can just set the string, with escape codes for [title] and [link]. (Guess which one does what?)

Just add your hashtags wherever you like.

So the whole thing is pretty pain-free, frankly. Now let’s see if this tweets anyone when I publish it.

Edit: Yes, yes it does.

Related posts:

1. Blogathon 2009
2. Blogathon 2009: In which Catherine supports cancer research
3. Blogathon 2009 Agenda
4. Blogathon 2009: The Typography of Idiocracy
5. Blogathon 2009: The Get-Out-Of-Beddening.