Tracked Tweets
Tracked Tweets is my first wordpress plugin. There are plenty of plugins that tweet each new post you make, but I think there are a few features in this one that are not provided anywhere else.
URL Shortening
Post URL’s are shortened before they are added to the tweet. Current shorteners are:
- TinyURL
- tr.im
- bit.ly
- the RevCanonical wordpress plugin
Google Analytics Tracking
As far as I know, no other plugins provide this. This component allows you to see Google Analytics data which is specific to Twitter. Without building a custom link, twitter will not be tracked correctly. You are able to segment by all twitter visits, or a single campaign. I haven’t fully explored the tracking possibilities yet 
- On the main settings screen, you can define the Google source and medium fields
- The post title is used as the campaign name
Hashtag/Tweet customisation support
- On the post level, you are able to specify hashtags (or any other custom text you need)
Screenshots
Options Page
New Post page, showing Tracked Tweets section
Version History
v 0.2.9
- Added support for bit.ly, tr.im and RevCanonical Plugin
v 0.2.8
- Small code update to use wordpress functionality to set campaign title (rather than my own code)
v 0.2.7
- Added settings link to plugin management page
- Added warning when settings are not set
- Choose between curl and filegetcontents depending on security
- Added Error message when server security will break plugin
- Fixed “Headers Already Sent” Issue
v 0.2.6
- Fixed svn commit issue
v 0.2.5
- Added title shortening to fit into 140 character limit
- Fixed bug – tweets now work if a post was a draft
- Added default setting for “tweet this post” checkbox
- Password does not have to be entered each time options are updated
v 0.2.4
- Donate link opens in new window
- Added CSS, removed inline styles
- Cleaned code
- Fixed issue that was preventing some users from posting urls
v 0.2.3
- Added donate link
- Added “Tweet this” checkbox
v 0.2.1
- Updated some descriptive text within plugin options screen
Download Tracked Tweets from Wordpress. I hope you find it useful. Feedback would be appreciated.
Delicious
Dopplr
Facebook
Flickr
Last.fm
LinkedIn
Twitter
68 Responses
Works great, thank you
This looks like an excellent plugin, Jack! Very nice. If I may, I’d like to compliment and thank you for the use of good sized screenshots. So many plugins use tiny little, low-res screenshots making it nearly impossible to understand the function or options of the plugin. Yours are sharp and legible, which I appreciate very, very much.
I’m glad you both like it
Let me know if you have any feature requests!
Jack
Excellent plugin, Jack. Nice and lean, and it just works. I have but one feature request: provide the option to not tweet a post from the “Add new post” page.
A simple checkbox would be ideal.
Thanks again.
Hi James, good idea – should be pretty easy to implement as well.
Looks to be a good & Diff plugin. I’ll share it my readers some time in the week.
@TechZoomIn Thanks, I don’t think there are any others with the same functionality. I look forward to the mention
[...] Jack released his first plugin which can tweet all your posts automatically once you post it on your blog. One better thing about this plugin is that, it tweets with the tiny url. So your followers doesn’t know what is that link, until they clicks on it. You can also track the analytics with Google analytics to know how its working and how much traffic you’re getting. All this works only if you have good amount of followers there [...]
@ Jack,
Dude shared it with my readers here: http://www.techzoomin.com/plugin-to-tweet-all-your-posts-automatically/
Wow!… Very nice and useful plugin! I downloaded and installed it. Five minutes after, my Twitter profile was updated without any problem. Thanks a lot!
Antonio Giossa
Buenos Aires | Argentina
this is great man, i will put it right to my blog.. huhu
Woooot! That sounds awesome, that’s what I’m looking for.
I love it to send an individual tweet for each new blog post. The automatic tweet of all these other plugins is… crappy *grins*
First test results – great!
Feature-Request
I would like an option, if the “Tweet this post?” checkbox is checked per default!
(I don’t want to tweet every new blog entry…)
Hey Marc, I’ll add the checkbox default setting to the admin screens
Jack
Great, thanks
Hi all, I encourage you to use the red “feedback” tab on the side of the screen to report any future feature requests or bug reports. This makes things easier for me, and helps to prioritise.
Thanks!
Jack
I installed it on a 2.2 wp and it doesn’t show any checkbox.
Hi Nicola, thanks for letting me know. If anyone else has this issue, please use the feedback tab on the left to get it fixed.
I found a bug. In the trackedtweetsprepare_message function the [extra] varialbe is replaced with the value from the _trackedtweets_tweetthis_value (“checked”) instead of _trackedtweets_extra_value. Which is commented out, why ?
plz let me know
Hi Helgi, which version of the plugin are you using? That sounds like some testing I was doing, but it should only be in the development version (0.2.5), if anywhere. Did you install from the wordpress plugin directory?
Has anyone else seen this behaviour? I just checked the repo, and it looks ok to me.
I installed this and I THINK it might have messed up my post pages. I was wondering if anyone knows how to fix this.
I haven’t even gotten a chance to use the plugin yet because I don’t think it installed correctly. But here’s an example of the error:
http://blog.contrabandwrestling.com/?p=105
just look at the end of the article with he php error messages.
If anyone has any idea… comment on my blog or send me an IM on AIM… Screen name is C0NTR4l34ND. Greatly appreciated.
Quick note, I spoke with LIBERT4D/C0NTR4l34ND and had a look at the theme files to fix the error. It looks like other people have trouble with the tinyurl API as well! This was caused by the theme trying to get a tinyurl.
This issue was unrelated to tracked tweets.
@Jack .. Yes I installed it from the WP plugin site. I have version 0.3
Cheers for the fast response
Thats weird, there definitely shouldn’t be a version 0.3 – I’m only up to 0.2.4.
Could you please install using the following link? This is the latest stable version:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/tracked-tweets.0.2.4.zip
@Jack Yes, I hadn’t seen that until you asked me for the version. I use your plugin on various WP sites, and two of them have 0.3. While other once have 0.2.4.
I will downgrade the two with 0.3. Thank you again for good plugin.
Great plugin! Thanks, just what I was looking for. Look like there’s some carriage returns at the end of the file in 0.2.6.
Hey John, thanks for pointing that out. Fixed in 0.2.7.
[...] Tweets // Tracked Tweets is a nifty WordPress plugin that will tweet your posts. The format of the tweet is customizable. [...]
Well .. now since twitter manly uses bit.ly, why not use that instead of tinyurl.com ? bit.ly is even 5 characters shorter
*hint* $t_url = “http://bit.ly/api?url=” . $trackedlink;
.. and even better. How about detect if the RevCanonical plugin is installed and use that for shortening?
if (function_exists('revcanonical_shorten')) {
$t_url = revcanonical_shorten($id);
} else {
$t_url = "http://bit.ly/api?url=" . $trackedlink;
}
Hi Helgi, I will consider adding these features to the next version – thanks for the suggestions
New Features:
I want to tweet my old posts from “Edit Post” page, just “Tweet this post” button will be good. Is it possible?
Sounds like a good idea, not sure how I would implement it though. I will think about it then add it.
@Jack
I want to know the existing features as well as new features of this plugin by version, will you please dedicate a page to list all recent updates and old updates? so that readers will have an idea of what features are added in the latest version and what already had in the older versions. Thanks.
@Hariharakumar
Good idea, I need to do something about that. Until then, the plugin page is the best place to look.
Any news on the revcanonical implementation or the use of bit.ly?
Hi Helgi, I’ve been too busy to spend time on it at the moment, but it is a high priority when I work on tracked tweets next. I hope to have an update by Friday night.
No problem. If you need any help you can send me an email. I would be glad to help you.
ps. thanks for accepting the friend request on Facebook
Hi…! This rocks. You rock. Thank you for sharing and helping people out. I send you a virtual beer
Nice Plugin, but not working with planned articles. When a planned article goes public, twitter was not start a message to the readers.
Please update this error in next version..
Thanks
Hi Phillip, I’ll have a look – thanks for letting me know.
Good job with this plugin, easy to use, works great, thanks
Love the plugin, but before we can implement it on NORML’s main site, we need to know your privacy policy. What do you do to protect the usernames and passwords people are giving to your third-partt software?
Hi Russ,
The Twitter username and password are saved in your wordpress database, and are sent directly to Twitter via their API.
They are stored unencrypted in the wordpress database though – if someone has access to the DB, they can find out the password.
That said, you probably have far bigger issues if someone has DB access (and shouldn’t).
I can’t really tell you any more than that, but as the source is available, you can have a look at how everything works.
Let me know if you have any questions, I hope the plugin works out for you.
first let me thank you for that plugin. It really works and I use it on several blogs. I just sent you 10 Dollar.
Too bad that canonical URLs just won’t work with me.
Say, as an workaround, could you please include the abilty to use the “ugly” Post-ID links. I think they are short enough.
Juergen
Juergen, thank you very much for your donation. I can’t get the canonical URLs to work at all in my wordpress install.
I will add the basic post id links as an option, good idea.
Thanks again,
Jack
Hello, Jack,
too bad It seems that the basic post ID doesn’t work properly when you already activate Permalinks. But maybe I am wrong.
BUT I found another short url plugin which works fine: Twitter Friendly Links (http://kovshenin.com/wordpress/plugins/twitter-friendly-links/)
When activating “Canonical relation” it works.
Maybe href=”permalink” maked the difference.
Juergen
Hi Juergen, I was thinking about this today – if we use the basic link, there will be no google tracking.
I will have a look at the plugin you mentioned, and see what I can figure out.
I just can’t get this to tweet.
As most people do I suppose I schedule post, and I’d like to be able to tweet them and tag them exactly as your plugin is supposed to.
I’ve also tried to ‘manually’ tweet the posts when published, but again, no joy.
I use the Thesis Theme. Might this be the issue? Or is an earlier version more likely to work for me?
David
Hi David, sorry to hear you are having trouble.
The theme would not be an issue I don’t think, unless it modifies the “add post” page.
It could be an issue with the scheduling of posts, but I thought this had been fixed. You also mention that you tried manually tweeting – do you mean just writing a post and pressing publish?
Which version of Wordpress are you using?
One request. Is it possible to allow tr.im’s to post to a user’s account (similar to the way you have bit.ly set up).
Otherwise, looks good.
Hi Tim, shouldn’t be too hard, I’ll try to get it done by Sunday.
Note to All: I will be overseas from 12 July to 15 October, and no work will be done on the plugin. Feel free to keep requesting things though.
Jack
Hi,I have a problem with Tracked Tweets 0.2.9:
Ican’t reach the options/management page:
I only get a blank page.
Previous versions work well!?
maxx
Maxx, that is strange. Try visiting the following directly:
http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=tracked-tweets/trackedtweets.php
Otherwise, try deactivating, deleting the plugin and reinstalling.
Hi,
it’s always the same with automatic updated version 0.2.9.
If I roll back to 0.2.8 everything works fine.
maxx
Hello,
I’m using WordPress 2.7 and I’ve just installed Tracked Tweets. The installation is now done, but I can’t activate it : each time I get on http://www.greenunivers.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=tracked-tweets/trackedtweets.php, I get a totally white page. What’s wrong ?
How can I rollback to the 0.2.8 version like maxx ? (that’s the first time I install tracked tweets)
I’ve found a solution to this issue :
1) Install the competitor plugin “Twitter Tools”
2) Go into the configuration page of this plugin, enter incorrect login/password and save (in order to flood with duplicate tweets)
3) Install Tracked Tweets (yeah, now it works !
4) Configure it
5) Then, don’t uninstall “Twitter Tools”, it will cause Tracked Tweets to crash. Juste leave it as it is, with wrong login/pass parameters.
6) Wait for Jack to find out what’s going on with this version and publish a new version !
I’ve been using this for a few weeks with no issues until today-ish (maybe yesterday), when I noticed that no tweet was happening upon creation of a new post as has been the case previously.
The only thing I’ve done is upgrade Wordpress to 2.83 and Tracked Tweets is currently activated. I left the box checked as normal, etc. and Twitter seems to be working fine because I am able to tweet from my phone and from their web site as well as from other services.
Wordpress 2.83 is certainly not a major update, so I do not suspect that would be the issue. Could something else be wrong here? It makes no sense because nothing else has changed.
Shawn +1
I’m having the same problem – just installed the plugin (v. 0.2.9) running on Wordpress 2.8.3.
It doesn’t tweet. I tried checking “tweet by default” and write a post – nothing. Manually updating a written post and checking “tweet this post” before I press “Update Post” doesn’t work either.
Any chance we can get a working version?
Thanks very much for your time and efforts Jack!