It’s easy if you try.
At least, it’s easy here on The Living Room Times, ever since the Great Blog Outage of December 3 (about which your children will someday ask, “Where we you?”) forced me to temporarily shut down Twitter-to-blog imports, in order to get the site back up and running. I keep planning to re-enable them, any day now, any minute now, but… but…
Well, I think maybe I like the blog better without them.
Shutting off the torrent of incoming tweets has forced me to actually blog a little bit more, taking some thoughts that I would otherwise have just tweeted (and then promoted the tweet to the front page), and instead fleshing them out into full blog posts. This is a slight time-sink, but not that much of one, as it turns out. (It’s not like Twitter isn’t a time-sink.) And the blog loses a bit of immediacy, no question, the prevention of which is the whole reason I created the Twitter-to-blog setup in the first place. But I think the trade-off of the homepage being less cluttered with tweets I’ve promoted, and having a few more actual blog posts, might be worth it. Also, I find myself feeling a bit more liberated on the Twitter side, not constantly worrying about how my tweets will look on da blog. Instead I can just… tweet.
My nascent plan/thought — one that would both maintain this accidental, but perhaps preferable, status quo, and also, for technical reasons I won’t bore you with, alleviate a lot of the back-end stress on Bluehost’s servers that caused the blog shutdown in the first place — is to create a separate blog (not just a separate category, as it’s set up currently, but an entirely independent WordPress installation) for tweets only; link that blog from the navigation bar at the top of this blog (picture the word “Tweets” right next to “Links”); allow comments on that separate blog, and try to find a way to display the comments on both blogs together on a central “recent comments” page and/or sidebar thingy (that’ll be the trickiest part); return to a two-column layout (Hallelujah, right?); maybe start doing a manually-selected “Tweets of the Day” feature (with copy-and-pasted tweets in a regular-looking blog post, and added context/commentary as needed); and install this plugin, which would seemingly allow me to easily copy a tweet-post from the Tweet Blog to the Main Blog, on those rare occasions when it seems like a good idea to do so (despite the resulting “clutter” problem). And then perhaps — though this also will be a challenge — I can find a way to re-create the tweet sidebar for #DU-related tweets over on Pioneer Pulse, which I tend to think is far more useful than the all-purpose Twitter import sidebar here on LRT.
What say you, LRT readers?
(Speaking of navel-gazing…)
I just have one thing to say:
I told you so 😀
I like all of that. Sounds like it’s at least worth trying for a while, right? I think the blog is always more fun when there’s a chance you might “get rolling” on something in a fleshed-out post (e.g. Grand Unified Theory of PANIC!)
I’m not a fan of the tweeting, dag nabbit!
I recollect a time, oh, way back in aughts, when there was none of this here newfangled “tweetering”.
We had thoughts, I say! Fully composed, well articulated thoughts! Not only full words, but sentences! And even paragraphs!
I urge you, Brendan, to stand athwart these tweets and yell stop! Preserve your noble tradition of bloggistry! Consign these foul tweets to the dustbin of history!
You are far better built for blogging than tweeting. I have always loved your endless blathering and over-analysis on our shared topics of interest. They just can’t be captured in a tweet. And I too love less clutter.
But then again I am becoming an old fart.
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when there was none of this here newfangled “tweetering”.
We had thoughts, I say! Fully composed, well articulated thoughts! Not only full words, but sentences! And even paragraphs….Twitter is a no follow sites ,it doesn’t affect any thing if it is not there…
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I like the idea. I’m not a fan of the twitter phenomenon (he said without breaking into curmudgeon-speak), and it clutters up the blog.
And this way, we get to see how long that WAC joke stays funny!
Brendan, why not just put in a link to your twitter feed? If people want to respond to tweets they can use twitter. Much much simpler.
Partly because I like the archival & search-enabling quality of the Twitter-to-blog import. Twitter’s search and archival capacity is absolutely godawful. By auto-importing all my tweets into WordPress, I effectively archive them.
Also, having comments here on tweets allows non-Twitter-using curmudgeons like AMLTrojan to comment on political tweets. 🙂
Imagine there’s no Twitter. It’s easy if you try!
No fail whales below us!
Above us bird less sky!
Imagine all the people!
Freed from Retweeting!
You may say I’m a dreamer!
But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us.
And the world won’t Tweet as one!
^bravo!
“Also, having comments here on tweets allows non-Twitter-using curmudgeons like AMLTrojan to comment on political tweets. :)”
You say that like its a bad thing 😉
LOL @ Brandon. Also at David. Heh.