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CUNY on Twitter

twitter news dropdownThe Commons provides a great way to use Twitter to track what’s going on at CUNY.  To find tweets from the @cunycommons/cunycommons list go to our Twitter News page or find it easily by clicking on “News” Tab on the Commons Home page and then the “Twitter” drop down option (circled in red on the picture to your right). This page shows:

  • Tweets from Commons Members – The Commons maintains a list of its members’  Twitter accounts.  Tweets from these accounts are aggregated here.  To get your account on this list, send us an email at [email protected].
  • Tweets from around CUNY – whenever anyone uses hash tags like #CUNY, #CUNYCOMMONS, #CUNYEVENTS,  these tweets will be aggregated here.
  • @cunycommons tweets – these tweets come from the Commons own account – @cunycommons.  They generally advertise new content posted on the Commons.
  • #cuny – Tweets that include hash tags #cuny are aggregated here.
  • #cunyevents – Tweets that include hash tag #cunyevents are aggregated here.

On the right hand side of the page (pictured below), you’ll see:

  • options to sort by the categories above
  • a quick refresher about how Twitter works
  • other Twitter resources
  • a download link which takes you to the source code found on GitHub.

cunyTwitter

Our Tweets are refreshed every five or ten minutes.  Refresh your browser to find the latest news. The software which makes all this possible was developed by the CUNY Academic Commons.  We hope you enjoy it!

Twitter Mentions As Comments

twitter mentionsThe Twitter Mentions As Comments plugin is a neat way to harvest all the tweets referring to your WordPress posts and display them as comments on your site.  The workflow is identical to the comment workflow on your site, and is controlled in Settings>>Discussion.  You configure how notifications, comment moderation, and author whitelists/blacklists work.  The plugin gets the poster’s real name and profile picture and links directly to the original Tweet.  And best of all, it does it automatically.

After activating the plugin, you’ll notice an entry added to your Dashboard Settings tab.  Here you can control the way the plugin operates:

twitterMentionsSettings

If you tweet about your posts, you might what to blacklist your own Twitter account to avoid getting comments from yourself.

For support, check out the plugin’s site on GitHub.

Twitter Tools Plugin

Based on Matt Gold’s post “How to Create Blog Subscriptions”.

The Twitter Tools Plugin, which again is available from the dashboard of your blog, allows you to connect your blog posts to a twitter account. You can create an automated process so that every time a new blog post is published on your blog, an update with a link is posted on Twitter.

When you set up this plugin, be sure to go back into your twitter tools setting to make sure that the Application Type has read and write access (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-twitter-tools-it-works-make-sure-twitter-application-has-read-and-write-access).

Here’s a screenshot that shows the look of the resulting twitter account posts:

Twitter account connected to a blog

As you might notice, I activated the companion Twitter Tools: bit.ly links plugin to create shortened URLs (useful on a platform like twitter that has a 140-character space limitation).

Subscription Options

 

The Subscription Options plug-in is available to all Commons members from the dashboard of their blogs (just click on “Plugins” in the left-hand menu and search for “subscription options”). The plugin will help you create icons like this, which can be placed in the sidebar of your blog to give your readers various ways to subscribe to your blog.

The buttons there connect to 1) The blog RSS feed, which readers can subscribe to through their favorite RSS Reader; 2) An email notification option (more about this below); 3) A link to a blog twitter account (more about this below) 4) A link to a Facebook page (ours is a little out of date!).

Once you’ve activated the plugin, follow the directions on the plugin installation page under “setup” to add the widget to the sidebar of your blog and configure the settings.

Note that the email subscription option uses Google’s Feedburner to send out posts by email. You’ll have to set up an account on Feedburner to make this work, but it’s worth your time: Feedburner offers not just subscription options, but also statistical analysis and many other ways of connecting to your readers. Also nice is the fact that it sends out full posts via email. Also, once you’ve set up your account with google, the process of signing up is easy for your subscribers — they just need to click on the email icon, enter their address, and confirm it via email. After that, they’ll receive a daily digest email on every day that new content is posted to the blog. If you have questions about the setup process, check out Google’s Feedburner Email Subscription Help Page.

The options in the Subscription Options plugin allow one to control the size of the icons in the sidebar, which is a nice feature. I like the fact the the icons are big and bright, though I’ve resized them to 50 pixels on this and other blogs.

Alternatively – check out Subscribe2, another plug which offers convenient subscriber management, especially for group blogs.

Creative Commons License

Environment: Reclaim Dev

Branch: 2.5.x

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