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.
I have the Twitter tool plugin in my WP blog as at some moments, I do not have time to blog a longer post but spend the day twittering between tasks and the daily digest allows me (and my readers, if there are any) to get an idea of what is going on and that I am alive 🙂 without having to follow the instant Twitter updates.However, thank you for pointing to Simply Exclude. It seems a good way to control them and send them to a different page.
@Barbara Dieu
I think you have isolated how Twitter can meet a real need as a microblogging application. I like the flexible API and how others have used it to integrate the content (our content!) whereever we like.