Zen 2.0

Yesterday I had the crazy of idea of reviving my long dormant blog and tweeted that. Immediately Rich Miller (@rhm2k) had a great suggestion.

Unfortunately, after looking around a bit, I couldn’t find any existing solution to do this. So I decided to hack my own. This hacked up solution is based on a slightly modified version of Twitpress and a new module I hacked up called Twitcomments. The basic idea is to have Twitpress tweet the blog post as it was designed to do, but adding a unique hashtag to the end of that tweet. Then add a section to the blog post to display the Twitter search results of this unique hashtag. For me it’s right below the blog post but before the normal blog comments.

So below is the steps to recreate what I have on Zen 2.0.

1. Modify Twitpress to add a parameter for [postid]. The line I added to Twitpress 0.3.2 is line 250.

   $proto = str_replace( "[permalink]", $post->guid, $proto );
   $proto = str_replace( "[postid]", $postID, $proto );
   $proto = str_replace( "[link]", get_option( 'home' )."?p=".$postID, $proto );
   

   This essentially allows me to put “[postid]” (without quotes) in the Twitpress configuration. Mine looks like this

   New blog: [title] [permalink] #zen[postid]

   So when Twitpress post to Twitter, the actual tweet will look like this:

   

   Note the “#zen284″ hashtag? That’s hashtag that I will later on use to search for any comments related to this post. The hope is that people would carry this throughout the conversation.

2. To allow a bit more flexibility, you can add a few more lines to Twitpress so it will add additional hashtags based on the meta information associated with the post. To do that, add the following lines (for me this starts at line 254 below all the str_replace calls):

   $hashtags = get_post_meta($postID, "Hashtags", true);
   if ($hashtags) {
   	$proto .= " " . $hashtags;
   }

   And in the blog post, you can add a custom field with the name “Hashtags” and some value. For this blog post, I added “#csaguide”. The value of “Hashtags” will be added to the Twitpress tweet.

3. To add the twitter search to each of the blog posts, you need to download my hacked up plugin Twitcomments and put it under the directory “wp-content/plugins/twitcomments”. Make sure you rename “twitcomments.txt” to “twitcomments.php”.

   In addition, you need to download SimplePie and copy “simplepie.inc” in the same directory. SimplePie is used for parsing the twitter search result, which is in ATOM format.

   You will also need to update twitcomment.php and change “#zen” to whatever you set your unique hashtag prefix to be.

   Once you have done all that, make sure you go into WP’s plugins page and activate Twitcomments.

4. The last thing you need to do is add a function call to your theme’s single.php.

   <?php twitcomments(); ?>

   Add this to wherever you like your twitter comments to appear. Once you do that, you should see something like the following when you go to your post.

   

   You can go to this post to see an example of this in action.

That’s it. I know it’s not pretty the way I’ve written it up. If someone wants to take this, modify it so it’s configurable through WP, and package it up nicely, please feel free to do so. You can consider my hacked up plugin to be New BSD licensed.

Enjoy!