The process of getting my tweets onto my blog is so ridiculous that I just had to write a post about it.
I essentially took notes using Twitter during the IA Summit, and wanted to post recaps for each session I attended on my blog. Tweets are listed in the archive in reverse chronological order (latest at the top) so copying and pasting them straight would make no sense to anyone if I’m trying to tell a start-to-finish story.
So here’s what I did:
- Copy all the tweets from a session
- Paste them in a word doc
- Convert text to table (separate text at paragraph)
- Find/Replace for “Whitney Hess whitneyhess #IASummit2008” and “2008 from web Icon_star_empty Icon_trash”
- Delete the timestamp from the end of each tweet
- Insert column to the left
- Number each tweet from 1 to N
- Sort by Column 1, Number, Descending
- Clear the numbers in the left column
- Paste “<li>” in every cell of the left column
- Insert column to the right of the tweet
- Paste “</li>” in every cell of the right column
- Convert table to text (separate text with Other, space)
- Select all and copy
- Paste in the HTML view of my blog post
- Put “<ul> </ul>” around the whole thing
- Write an intro
- Publish the post
Ludicrous process, right? Is there something I could have done more easily?
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Live-blogged them instead of live-tweeting them? Call me crazy…
It seems it would have been fairly easy to start a WordPress blog at each session, fill in the points as you’re sitting there, then hit publish. You could even publish after each point. You could let people who want to follow it as it goes know to check your blog post and hit refresh as much as they want.
Many bloggers do this when covering MacWorld, for example. I’ve often followed it this way. Hitting refresh to get updates is kind of annoying, but I know I can always check back any time to see what I missed.
I’m sorry it was so painful! I guess there could be a few ways to use the API to spit our only the text coming from you that had the hashtags you used. Probably would have taken longer to make that than what you did though – but you may want to try Yahoo Pipes to try that for your next event?
Regardless, your live twittering of the Summit was invaluable — live blogging would not have had the same effect. Much appreciated Whitney!
Hey, I just wanted to second Livia’s comment about how valuable your twittering was during the summit. Thanks again for doing such a great job with it!
Hi Whitney, Heidi recommended your blog to me as I was following the IA Summit remotely.
There’s a WordPress plugin called Twitter Tools which will automatically publish your tweets as blog posts but it will only do a daily digest, I think… not exactly what you wanted here, on a per-session basis.
This might help: http://pipes.yahoo.com/jacksonfox/twittercleanup
I use a variant of this pipe to cleanup my Twitter RSS feed before I import it into Tumblr/Jaiku/etc. Mostly it strips out excess fields and the “username:” string at the front of the Twitter feed.
It still outputs RSS — it looks like Pipes has no text output option — but the RSS is a lot cleaner.
Did you ever try out LoudTwitter? I was hoping I could see it in action over here, as I’m still considering it.
Megan, I was really looking forward to using LoudTwitter but it only works with Atom RSS feeds and I don’t think my WordPress blog has one.
Jackson and Andy, thanks for the recommendations! Definitely planning to check out Yahoo! Pipes and will see if I have a need for the Twitter Tools plugin in the future.
And to Livia and Matthew, I can’t thank you enough for your kind words and support. It was never my intention to be a pest. I hoped I was providing value at the conference and I’m glad that it was worth something to you, however small. Thanks again.
Thank you for sharing this information.
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