Microblogging via Twitter

I’m not a fan of Twitter; I think it’s kind of silly to expect people to follow your every move, every minute of every day. Further, it’s yet another site for people to go to check in on their friends.

I have a Twitter feed (and Facebook and MySpace pages, among others), but it’s more because I need to know about this stuff than because I actually use it.

But I found a neat use for Twitter. I had wanted to create a "microblog" — a section on this site for quick hits that didn’t warrant a full blog entry. WordPress lets me do that pretty easily — I can create a category called "microblog" and have posts in that category appear in a separate place.

But that would mean launching my blogging tool (Windows Live Writer) every time I wanted to dash something off. I wanted something quicker.

Twitter to the rescue.

I may not like it, but plenty of others do, and that popularity means there are plenty of Twitter tools, including a Firefox add-in called Twitterbar that lets you type an entry into your browser’s address bar and have it posted to Twitter.

Way cool. Way cool because I also found Alex King’s neat WordPress plugin called Twitter Tools. It takes any Twitter post and makes it a blog entry in a category of your choice.

So I created a "twitter" category, installed these two tools, and whenever I post a twit — er, tweat — it’s automatically pulled into this blog. (See the right side of the home page.)

So now I can post a fast "microblog" entry from Firefox’s address bar by clicking on a little green plus sign. Way cool.

Update: I spoke too soon. It seems Twitter has some problems, so the updates don’t always work. I thought it was a WordPress problem, but I see it’s on Twitter’s end. Oh, well.