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Tips for WordPress.

For those of you who are curious, with the assistance PapaScott, I figured out a pretty quick and dirty way to import Tweets from Twitter into WordPress. This is probably neither the optimal nor most elegant way to do it, but it worked for me.

First: Get a file to import.

WordPress will import a number of file types. However unless you are a programmer, the easiest file type to obtain and import is a file with an RSS Feed.

You can obtain a file with your entire Twitter history (up to the maximum of 3,200, or so, Tweets) for free from TweetBackup.com. You’ll need to follow @tweetbackup for it to work, but you can always stop following it once you’ve gotten what you want.

Depending upon the length of your history, it may take awhile before your file is ready. Once the file, ending with “xml”, is ready, download it. You need this file for step two. My file, with approximately 1,900 Tweets, was 1.1MB in size, so yours will probably not take up a lot of disk space.

Second: Import the File

>>Tools >>Import >>RSS

Before you do this, there are two things to consider.

It’s best to change the default category for your new posts so that the Tweets you import are in the category you want them to be in. I stupidly imported them into the default category of “uncategorized” which resulted in a headache. Although one can rename that category, my webhost’s server wasn’t happy with trying to change the name of the category across 1,900 individual Tweets. Remember to change the default category back to your original settings once you are finished.

Next, be aware that your webhost server might choke on the number of entries. I could only import about 1,200 entries before the server choked. Once it choked, I identified the last Tweet WordPress imported and then, using a text editor (e.g. not Microsoft Word), I opened the file and deleted all the entries from the file that had already been imported into WordPress. I saved the file (under a new name), and then imported the remaining Tweets into WordPress.

It is relatively straightforward to identify the text elements that make up one Tweet—just be careful that you delete complete entries, otherwise WordPress won’t import the resulting file. For the record, Tweet entries start with ‘<item>‘ and end with ‘</item>‘.

Third: Activate @ # and URLs

So that my archived Tweets are clickable and userfriendly, I installed both Autolink URI and Tweet. Autolink URI will take anything starting with http:// and turn it into an active URL on the fly, so you don’t need to go back and fix the hyperlinks in your old Tweets. Tweet does the same when @ and # appear in your archived Tweets, thus making them clickable.

Fourth: Keeping it Current.

To keep my archive current, I installed Twitter Tools and configured it to update the archive with my most recent Tweets. As there was some overlap between my downloaded archive and my recent Tweets, I had to delete the duplicates—in my case deleting the 20 duplicates took only a few minutes.