Blog Tweets: New Plugin Pulls Tweets into IntenseDebate
Our Plugins API is seeing a lot of activity now, and we’re pleased to announce the release of the new Blog Tweets plugin. Developed by Vivek Puri, the Blog Tweets plugin uses LinksAlpha to aggregate Tweets linking to your blog post in your IntenseDebate comments section. Blog Tweets will show up to 20 Tweets in your comments section – pretty cool!
Aggregating Tweets linking to your blog can help provide a more holistic view of the conversation going on about your posts. This has been a popular feature request, and we’re really excited about Vivek’s work.
About the plugin:
When you activate the plugin, LinksAlpha.com indexes your blog feed and scours Twitter for related Tweets that link back to your post. This includes Tweets that link to your post using URL shortening services like bit.ly.
There is a 5-10 minute period for your post to be indexed by LinksAlpha, which means there will be a slight delay for Tweets to start showing up in your comments section.
Also, when the plugin hits the Twitter API it is likely that Twitter will only return results for recent posts, so Tweets about your older posts won’t necessarily show up.
All Tweets are displayed just below the comment section under the header, “Social Trackbacks,” so Tweets won’t interrupt the comment stream.
Like all IntenseDebate plugins, adding advanced features to your comment section is a piece of cake: just visit your Plugins Page at http://intensedebate.com/plugins, and select “Activate” next to the plugin. That’s all! There’s no additional code for you to manually install, so there’s no need to get your hands dirty messing around with your template.
Please keep in mind that activating plugins for your IntenseDebate comments means that additional code will be loading in your comments section, which may impact load times (especially if you’re running loads of our cool plugins 😉 ).
Interested in flexing your own coding muscles and developing a super-slick plugin? Check out our Plugin Resources and documentation. You can also check out our Plugins blog post for more information.
Posted by Michael Koenig in features