The new version of my PRO extension for WP to Twitter is now available. The update fixes a variety of minor bugs, creates some clarifying error messages – but most importantly adds some great new features.

In version 1.3.0, you can now:

Schedule a Custom Tweet

Schedule a Tweet for any time and associate it with any post you’ve published. Simple and straightforward: you can either send it as straight text — what you wrote, and nothing but what you wrote — or you can send it through the WP to Twitter template processor and fetch information from the post on the fly.

Lock Co-Tweeting to one account.

Want to send your posts to two accounts, but not to just any old account? Don’t want to expect your authors to set up their own accounts? No problem. You can set your Co-tweeting to always post to a specific second account.

Custom Filtering

WP to Twitter has a couple of filtering options — filter by category, don’t post edits, etc. However, the gamut of how you might want to filter your Tweets can be pretty complicated. WP Tweets PRO 1.3.0 adds an option to create a custom filter for Tweets – you can specify a wide variety of rules that will prevent a Tweet from being sent. Block a specific post from ever being Tweeted; block a specific author; block a specific word in the title — it’s up to you.

WP Tweets PRO does a lot to improve your ability to customize how your WordPress site communicates with Twitter – and it just got a lot more powerful!

Buy it now!

Twitter is currently in the much-lambasted and disruptive process of making big changes to their API. As the author of a WordPress plug-in which only exists with any value due to its ability to use the Twitter API, I have to be pretty attentive to these kinds of changes.

The API changes probably won’t have any significant impact on WP to Twitter or on most users of WP to Twitter. Technically, I’ve needed to change the name of the application since their last major change in terms of service – the use of the “Twitter” mark is a violation of their terms of service. (Technically, a violation of their trademark guidelines.) That will probably happen in the next few months – so be warned. It’s going to be a pain, but I have to do it.

However, these changes — as published so far — don’t appear to have a major impact on a software application like WP to Twitter.

First, a significant set of the changes regard the display of Tweets. Well, fortunately, WP to Twitter doesn’t display Tweets in any way. So, I can pretty much ignore that entire section.

Second, the next big set of changes have to do with application size. Now, WP to Twitter does have over a million downloads – which probably translates to 20 or 30,000 active users. Maybe even more. However, from the Twitter application perspective every one of those users is a separate application; so none of them are large scale applications which will greatly impact Twitter.

Third, they’re modifying the rate limiting rules. While hypothetically this could effect WP to Twitter, it’s not very likely. The limit is something like 60 calls per hour for a given endpoint. WP to Twitter uses only one endpoint – the status update endpoint – so you may run into this if you’re posting more than 60 times per hour from your WordPress blog. Possible, but not very likely.

So, on the basis of what Twitter has published so far, WP to Twitter appears to be safe. However, it is certain that these rules are not the complete set of rule changes. For now, I’ll just try and keep up with the information and find out what’s going to happen. WP to Twitter isn’t going anywhere yet.

But I do suggest that you subscribe to my blog to keep updated…

I finally released version 2.4.0 of WP to Twitter today. The latest major version release was quite a long time ago – 2.3.0 went out in June of 2011, and although it has received 18 (18!) bug fix or minor feature updates since then, the plug-in hasn’t had a good overhaul for a very long time.

Well, that’s not true anymore. The version I released today has some pretty substantial changes — it no longer requires cURL support, for one thing! A lot of the changes to WP to Twitter are, however, very un-sexy back-end rewriting.

What’s more significant is that I’m simultaneously releasing a brand new thing for me: a PRO upgrade to WP to Twitter!

It’s called WP Tweets PRO. WP Tweets PRO is all about new features: delayed tweeting of your new posts, automatically scheduled re-posting so those overseas readers don’t miss out, and full support for personalized Twitter posting for each author on your site.

WP Tweets PRO is available with a single-site license ($25) or a multi-site license ($90).

Buy the Single site license:

Buy the Multi-site license:

I hope you find it useful — that was certainly my goal!

New in Version 1.2.1:

• Added ability to delete CSS from the style library

New WordPress plugin: WP Post Styling. The plugin serves only one purpose: to create a place to add custom styles which will only apply to the current page or post in your WordPress blog.

Although not widely used on the internet, it’s a valuable magazine design technique to give each article a unique look and feel. A look and feel which shows the face of that article in a light which best represents the subject, topic, or style.

This plugin is intended to make that kind of post-by-post styling simpler.

It’s not that you can’t readily do this in WordPress — either by using a theme which applies style hooks for unique articles, by utilizing WordPress conditional functions to check whether a given page is active, or by whatever other means you might imagine — but this makes it much simpler, since you can simply enter the desired styles into a textarea directly in the post.

Comments and requests should be made at the WP Post Styling home page.

Technically, this plugin has been available from the WordPress plugin directory since last Monday, but today is it’s official launch. This is for two reasons: first, it gave the plugin a week to “shake out the bugs,” so that the official launch could be as stable as is reasonably possible.

Second, it’s my birthday, so I’ll be able to remember when the plugin launched. Isn’t that sweet?

The plug-in is pretty straightforward: it posts a status update about your new WP post to Twitter, passing by Pierre Far’s Cli.gs URL shortening service on the way. If you have a Cli.gs API key, you’ll get the added bonus that your Cli.gs will automatically show up in your Cli.gs account, so you can track the statistics of that Clig right from the beginning.

By default, the plugin will take a chunk of text you’ve defined and your post title and truncate them to an acceptable length (including your Cli.gs post URL) to send over to Twitter. However, you don’t have to just accept this stock text: you can custom author your Tweet for every post, using the WP to Twitter custom field in your post authoring interface.

Read more about WP->Twitter

Download it at WordPress!

Giving a talk is an interesting experience. In this case, with a time limit of 15 minutes, the biggest challenge was figuring out what I had time to cover. With a subject like web accessibility, I firmly believe that every aspect is critical — anything I leave out is something that somebody needs to know.

But it’s 15 minutes. You can’t really be effective if you try and cover the entire scope of a subject in 15 minutes.

The first challenge is figuring out the audience. In this case, I was speaking to a group of internet marketing professionals and site owners. For the most part, no programmers, no interface developers — not even people who necessarily have any direct access to the code of their sites. What can you teach them which they’ll be able to apply and understand immediately?

I’ve already given the speech, so I’m not trying to solicit suggestions for this particular event. However, I’m curious to know what you think are the most key issues.

For your reference, I covered three general areas:

• Navigation which can be used by non-visual, non-mouse using groups.
• Content which can be read sensibly by text-aware devices
• On-page navigation which can make the page easier to navigate

I completely ignored HTML validation, web standards, accessibility guidelines, and anything about following technical specifications. For this audience, this didn’t strike me as an actionable conversation. Instead, I focused on practical investigations of site problems: whether the site can be used with a mouse; whether the site makes it’s content available to screen readers (or search engines); and whether standard methods have been employed which will enable disabled users to quickly and easily get around the page.

So I’m curious: what would you have talked about?

This is just cool:

“Sitelinks” are additional links Google generates from the contents of a site in order to help users navigate your site — they provide these links in their search results for selected terms. Most sites don’t have site links, so I’m finding it pretty cool to notice them for myself!

If you can’t see the image, the current Sitelinks for this site are:

• Gallery
• Blog Home
• What is Web Accessibility
• SEO and Accessibility
• Articles

On the whole, I’m pretty pleased with the selection chosen here. They’ve pretty well pinned down the key areas of the site: web design, web accessibility, search marketing, and my writing on these topics. Everything is reasonably represented. Perhaps, in my forthcoming site redesign (don’t keep a look out; it’s not going to be that soon,) I’ll make a point to better promote these specific areas of the site.