Day: June 26, 2008

Jeffrey’s Twitter Updates for 2008-06-26

  • Still have a sore throat. Was home sick all day today, and do not feel much better yet. #
  • Just got some cake for dessert. Wow, I am exhausted. Off to bed. #
  • @aroberts Good way of mentioning this, Andy. WIth so many social network apps out there, it is easy to miss some. #
  • I am on #Friendfeed http://friendfeed.com/jeffreykeefer #
  • Made it to the office today. Have to call the doctor, as I think I am getting worse. #
  • Anybody a member of ODNetwork? #
  • @jazzychad I know what you mean. Here we are complaining about it, and go right back to use it again and again! I suppose we don’t learn? #
  • @smithjd Reading your post. Autoethnography is my methodology of choice. #
  • @smithjd Your link to “Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture” does not work. #
  • @jazzychad Perhaps you could help them! Hey, they just got another round of funding, so one may think they could upgrade the infrastructure. #
  • @clintlalonde Looking for a degree program or continuing ed or specific sessions only? #
  • Need soup. Waiting for the doctor to call back. #
  • Need soup. Waiting for the doctor to call back. #
  • @clintlalonde Sorry, no suggestions. The reason I asked is the MS program I teach in at NYU now can be done completely online. #
  • Gathering health literacy materials and links for a new project (again) in formation. #
  • Had healthy vegetarian Japanese food for dinner. #
  • Off to get a hair cut (though not too much). My hair is at the in between stage of too long and not long enough. #

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Exclude (Twitter) Feeds from Overwhelming WordPress’s Front Page

Do you use Twitter Tools, the wonderful WordPress plug-in that integrates Twitter feeds into and out from a blog? I do, and the main reason I like it is that it allows me to capture my Tweets on a daily basis as a single blog post.

Why, in turn, might I want this? Two reasons–firstly to capture my words and thoughts as I process life and work, and secondly because the daily blog post generates an email notification that in turn gets sent to friends and colleagues who read emails and not blogs or RSS feeds per se. This allows people who are interested in my life (there are a few of them, at least!) who do not live in the active world of social media, to still get a sense of what I am doing via a daily email push.

However (and here is the issue), I do not like having the front page of my blog filled with (at least) every other post to be a Twitter-post from the previous day. Looking for ways to handle this I finally stumbled upon the great WordPress plug-in Simply Exclude. This plug-in allows for a great amount of control of what sort of content to exclude from parts of a public blog. Go ahead, look down my homepage and see if you can see any Twitter-based posts. No? That is because I had Simply Exclude prevent the daily Twitter post from appearing on my front page. They are still there, such as right here, fully searchable (via keyword, month, category, etc.) and present enough to generate the RSS and email notifications, but flexible enough to make my blog appear more than just a Twitter archive.

While I actively try to have inclusive and engaging instructional events, I like having the option of excluding things from where they really do not fit. Simply Exclude may have some creative uses for WordPress-powered blogs that are more oriented to content management systems than traditional blogs, and I would like to explore these further.