(Update: Still don’t know how it affects the feed, but it borks the comments page. So I can’t leave post titles blank until if & when I get that figured out.)

By the way, since I’m blathering about my site I might as well tell you: I think I’m going to resume the folding of my Twitter-stream into my other blog posts, the way I used to do back before I stuck ‘em into a little box in the sidebar. This would apply to both the normal web-view and the RSS feed. I have mixed feelings about this. Assuming you use an RSS reader and also care enough to follow my blog there (that’s a big also) then the RSS feed is going to be (to the best of my ability) a complete version of the various info-chunks that appear on my site, at least during the odd phases of the moon when I’m going anywhere near this so-called blog. That would be a good scenario for most people. But if you also follow me on Twitter, then you’re getting duplicate info. That’s annoying. An ideal option would be to offer a separate RSS feed for people who wanted one without the tweets. I’ll work on it, maybe… but there are a lot of things I want to do to tweak my website, who am I kidding? If it starts bugging you, let me know in the comments and maybe that’ll put a fire under my ass to get the template in place.

(If you try this fix, I hope it works for you. But be aware that I’m NOT a plugin coder; I don’t actually know what I’m doing. So proceed at your own risk!)

The following instructions apply to TwitterTools v1.2b1, available in a zip-file here.

First, back up your files in case something goes horribly wrong! Then, open twitter-tools.php and find the “do_tweet_post” section, starting around line 272. It’ll look like this:

function do_tweet_post($tweet) {
    global $wpdb;
    remove_action('publish_post', 'aktt_notify_twitter');
    $data = array(

(etc. etc.)

Now you’ll make a new variable to display the tweets the way you want. I called my variable “tweetcontent” but you can call it something else if you like. Also, in my case I’m using an unordered list to mark up each tweet, even though there’s only one tweet per post. You don’t have to do that though, you can use whatever style-related tags you want.

So! Insert the following lines just before the last line (the $data one):

$tweetcontent .= '<ul>'."\n";
$tweetcontent .= '<li>'.aktt_make_clickable($tweet->tw_text).' <a href="http://twitter.com/'.$this->twitter_username.'/statuses/'.$tweet->tw_id.'">#</a></li>'."\n";
$tweetcontent .= '</ul>'."\n";

(You can also add a class name to the ul or the li; that’s how I style my tweets.)

So in the end the function will look like this:

function do_tweet_post($tweet) {
global $wpdb;
remove_action('publish_post', 'aktt_notify_twitter');
$tweetcontent .= '<ul>'."\n";
$tweetcontent .= '<li>'.aktt_make_clickable($tweet->tw_text).' <a href="http://twitter.com/'.$this->twitter_username.'/statuses/'.$tweet->tw_id.'">#</a></li>'."\n";
$tweetcontent .= '</ul>'."\n";
$data = array(

(etc. etc.)

One last thing. Please change the very next line:

'post_content' => $wpdb->escape(aktt_make_clickable($tweet->tw_text))

…to the following:

'post_content' => $wpdb->escape($tweetcontent)

(“tweetcontent” can be whatever variable name you used earlier, if you changed it.)

Save the plugin file and you’re done. Yup! You’re welcome. ;-) Feel free to post a comment if you did or didn’t get it working, or if you have any other TTTs to share.

BusinessWeek has an interesting (to us) article on Twitter this week: “The key question today isn’t what’s dumb on Twitter, but instead how a service with bite-size messages topping out at 140 characters can be smart, useful, maybe even necessary.

Link