Tweet Old Post Plugin
Tweet Old Posts is a plugin designed to tweet your older posts to get more traffic. Tweet Old Posts randomly picks your older post based on the interval specified by you. The primary function of this plugin is to promote older blog posts by tweeting about them and getting more traffic.
Click on Tweet Old Post to download the plugin.
Following are the steps to install the Tweet Old Post plugin
1. Download the latest version of the Tweet Old Posts Plugin to your computer from here.
2. With an FTP program, access your site’s server.
3. Upload (copy) the Plugin file(s) or folder to the /wp-content/plugins folder.
4. In your WordPress Administration Panels, click on Plugins from the menu.
5. You should see Tweet Old Posts Plugin listed. If not, with your FTP program, check the folder to see if it is installed. If it isn’t, upload the file(s) again. If it is, delete the files and upload them again.
6. To turn the Tweet Old Posts Plugin on, click Activate.
7. Check your Administration Panels or WordPress blog to see if the Plugin is working.
8. You can change the plugin options from Tweet Old Posts under settings menu.
Alternatively you can also follow the following steps to install the Tweet Old Post plugin
1. In your WordPress Administration Panels, click on Add New option under Plugins from the menu.
2. Click on upload at the top.
3. Browse the location and select the Tweet Old Post Plugin and click install now.
4. To turn the Tweet Old Posts Plugin on, click Activate.
5. Check your Administration Panels or WordPress blog to see if the Plugin is working.
6. You can change the plugin options from Tweet Old Posts under settings menu.
Install Tweet Old Posts Plugin
Tweet Old Posts
Some of the options you can configure for the Tweet Old Posts plugins are,
Twitter Username & Password – Using this twitter account credentials plugin will tweet.
Minimum interval between tweets – allows you to determine how often the plugin will automatically choose and tweet a blog post for you.
Randomness interval – This is a contributing factor in minimum interval so that posts are randomly chosen and tweeted from your blog.
Minimum age of post to be eligible for tweet – This allows you to set how old your post should be in order to be eligible for the tweet.
Categories to omit from tweets – This will protect posts from the selected categories from being tweeted.
Download
Download Tweet Old Post plugin – current version 1.0
Let me know if you have any suggestions or comments or critics for this.
Changelog –
v1.2 changed Dec 8th, 2009
Tweet Old Post Updated
Added two more options and one action button,
Tweet Prefix – Allows you to set prefix to the tweets.
Add Data - Allows you to set if you need to add post data to the tweets.
Tweet now - Button that will tweet at that moment without wanting you to wait for scheduled tweet.
Let me know if you have any suggestions or comments or critics for this.
v1.3 changed Dec 12th, 2009
URL Shortener Service – Allows you to choose URL shortener service from some of the predefined ones.
v1.4 changed Dec 27th, 2009
Hashtags – allows you to set default hashtags for your tweets.
v1.5 changed Feb 14th, 2010
Maximum age of post to be eligible for tweet – allows you to set Maximum age of the post to be eligible for tweet
Added one more shortner service was looking for j.mp but they dont have the api yet.
Nice plugin. Just installed it, seems to work (just waiting for the first tweet to go out).
Had a few quick ideas, probably pretty obvious, but here goes:
A one-button “tweet now” function would be handy, to send out a tweet whenever manually just in case.
It would be useful to have a prefix and/or suffix field to fill out. This way the messages that go out could be tailor made with hashtags and things.
Finally, not a big thing, but some lower increments for Minimum Post Age would be sweet. Being able to go as low as a week would be handy, at least in our case…
Anyhow, just some thoughts! Looking forward to seeing how this plugin develops.
@The Local Landing – Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll surely work on those and update it shorty within a day or two
keep posting
Please let me know if you got any more suggestions for me to work on
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Cool plugin – great way to make use of all the older content that gets lost in a world of now, now now!
What about a way to choose a different URL shortening service. I love bit.ly/j.mp as it gives you the ability to see how many people have clicked on links you have shared.
Thanks.
@JR Rozok – Thanks for the comment. I am working on it. I’ll include in my next upgrade. I’ll probably upgrade the plugin with some other url shortening options by Friday. So keep on checking
. Also let me know if you have any more suggestions.
Thanks.
One other suggestion –
What about the ability to add a hashtag to tweets that go out through this plugin? Many people use the “Selective Twitter Status” service to update their Facebook status with tweets that are tagged with #FB.
@JR Rozoko – I have thought about that, but since this is auto tweet via plugin, you will have same hashtag for all tweets and that can be either in beginning or at the end of the tweet. I don’t know if this would work for people. Let me know what you think on this.
Oh man, just woke up to find 3 for 3 of those suggestions I gave yesterday implemented. You’re my new favorite plugin developer EVER. Also, seems to be working fine, as there have been a few tweets sent out since i installed yesterday.
One other suggestion, though, would be picking the url shortening service. I know the Simple Twitter Link and Twitter Tools plugins have options like this, so it might be a good place to find the basis to work from code-wise.
Also, and I don’t really know how far out this one is, i haven’t seen a plugin that does something like it, but if you could pull any pics or a specified custom field from a post if it has one and link hat through twitpic when the old tweets are sent out, why, you’d have your crown for a long time.
Not to bog you down, man, three for three suggestions in one day is by far the fastest turnaround time i’ve ever seen from a plugin or its developer, and you deserve MAJOR kudos for that. These are just more ideas we’ve come up with, do with them as you see fit. Thanks for your work.
Ajay – that would work. Selective twitter status will update your facebook status from twitter anytime you include #FB in a tweet. Yes, you would have to decide whether or not you want all tweets through this plugin to go to Facebook. You couldn’t be selective. Thanks for working on this.
@The Local Landing – Thanks for the appreciations
I will be working on the ability to add hashtags and allow the user to choose the url shortening service. And regarding custom fields I can pull custom fields but the user will have to mention which custom field he wants to pull and I’ll include this in my next to next release, regarding pics I don’t know if we can do that need to check that out. I’ll work on these after my next release of adding hashtags and url shortening services.
@JR Rozoko – I’ll work on this. I am just thinking about how can I make this much better for the user, such that they love this and this plugin makes their life simple and gives what they want
@Henry – Thanks for the comment. I will be releasing the option to choose the URL shortening service in the next release soon. And regarding allowing the user to choose a post to tweet about is not much feasible, because a user may have lots of post and displaying them at one place and choosing between them may be cumbersome. So what you can do for this is add a new category and add posts to that category and have only that category being tweeted about. Regarding percentage need to think about how much feasible is that technically.
Guys thanks for the suggestions
Lovin’ the latest update.
is there a way I could set the default shortener to bit.ly?
perhaps the plugin could be even more dynamic if users could select say 10 posts of their choosing and have them tweeted randomly, over the space of 5 days, every 5 hours, etc.
Or even set a percentage for categories you’d like randomly posted more frequently
eg: featured category :70%
all other categories : 30%
Regardless, its a great plugin and I cant wait to see what’s next.
I can’t tell from this if a post with multiple categories will get eliminated if only one of the categories is allowed. Is this possible?
@Christopher – yes that will work if only one category is allowed it will extract only those post which belong to allowed category.
Guys added option to select URL Shorten-er service. Will shortly release option to add hashtags for tweets.
I will be giving this plugin a try, seems to be promising for driving traffic from twitter.
Since the 1.3v nothing is Tweeted, if I force a Tweet (“Tweet Now” button) it tells me error in top-core.php on line 149
@Micky – I tried tweeting from the Tweet Now button and it tweeted successfully. Can you try manually upgrading the plugin there must have been some problem with auto upgrade. Try manual installation and if the problem still persists please let me know. It would be great if you can give me the exact error description so that I can try replicating the same on my end.
Ok after full manual reinstall I got the same error, here the details:
Warning: SimpleXMLElement::__construct() [simplexmlelement.--construct]: Entity: line 1: parser error : Start tag expected, ‘__construct(‘0′) #1 /home/www/wp-content/plugins/tweet-old-post/top-core.php(60): shorten_url(‘http://www.mick…’, ‘bit.ly’, ‘R_3d6e9d6a0e146…’, ‘micky2be’) #2 /home/www/wp-content/plugins/tweet-old-post/top-core.php(42): top_opt_tweet_post(‘1085′) #3 /home/www/wp-content/plugins/tweet-old-post/top-admin.php(111): top_opt_tweet_old_post() #4 /home/www/wp-includes/plugin.php(339): top_admin() #5 /home/www/wp-admin/admin.php(91): do_action(”) #6 /home/www/wp-admin/options-general.php(10): require_once(‘/home/…’) #7 {main} thrown in /home/www/wp-content/plugins/tweet-old-post/top-core.php on line 149
@Micky – I am not getting this error, it works fine with my bit.ly account. I’ll still try to replicate this and will get back to you on this.
This XML parsing error may be because of incorrect bit.ly details supplied. While I’ll have a check on this, in the meanwhile can you please verify your bit.ly account details.
To verify your details you can try this,
http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&longUrl=url&login=username&apiKey=api_key&format=xml
copy paste this url in your browser, and replace the url, username, and api_key with your details and check the result.
Apparently it’s the bit.ly shortner that doesn’t work
It works fine now, but if I have a post with multiple categories and exclude any of those categories, then the whole post won’t tweet. I have several guest posts that I want to feature, but they also have other non-guest post categories that I’d like to exclude. This does not seem to be workable with the plugin unless I am doing something wrong.
@Christopher – Yes if the post belongs to any of the category that you have included in the omit list then it wont tweet about it.
Leider funktioniert bei mir der Filter für die Kategorien nicht, ein Update wäre da schön :/
@HappyNerd – Können Sie bitte das nochmal überprüfen, was genau ist passiert? dieser Kategorie ist die Liste dieser Gruppen aus der tweet ausschließen
Hi, Cool plugin! You rock!
Can I configure myself
-Minimum interval between tweets
-Randomness interval
-Minimum age of post to be eligible for tweet
in a code? I tried it with a third option “minimum age…” (you have a minimum of 7 days) I made it 1 day. Looks like that it appeared in settings (but I didn’t try it yet to twit to twitter). Another options (first and second), I tried to congigure them to be at least 30 min, but something went wrong and my whole blog dissapeared and I had to reinstall it again. No worries though. Now, everything is fine
What about to make one more option: “how many tweets to tweet at the time.” Like on a twitterfeed.com . Where you can choose a 30 min a minimum interval and post the maximum of 5 tweets at the time. And it would be nice to distribute them evenly through out of this 30 min interval. I notice, if 5 twits shows at one time, the only first twit gets the most attention but other ones will get left alone. It would be sad to waiste twits with no attention.
Would be helpful!
Thanks!
@Prime Idea – Thanks, I’ll try to do that for you. I am currently working on Hashtags. But I like the idea of “how many tweets to tweet”, I’ll surely think about that
Thanks for the suggestion
After trying Version 1.4 using bit.ly shortener. Tweets are not showing shortened links. No links at all show up. 1st I tried selecting “no” for adding post data, and no hash tag but still no link showing up. I will be Trying the old version again. I think the earlier version worked fine before you added the hash tag option.
@Jeff – Is it getting tweeted? or its just the links aren’t getting shortened? Well I tried it on my blog and checked it was working fine. I’ll still look into this. Can you try the tweet now button and see if it tweets.
Hi,
I’ve just install (manualy)the plug in.
When I update the options for the first time the folowing error occure:
“Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in [MY_WEB_SITE]/wp-content/plugins/tweet-old-post/top-core.php on line 119″
Note :
it’s with WP 2.9
and a bit.ly account.
all others options are in default value.
What’s happen ?
@Jacques – This is because your hosting has not enabled curl in PHP. Kindly contact you hosting service admin to get this enabled. It is used to call another URL and post things to that URL.
Hi,
thanks for your reply @ajay.
During the time beetween my ask and your replay, I constate the same reason. And I find a solution (on a forum of my hostong).
I add in top-core.php at the beginning of the function send_request (line 118)the folowing code:
if (!extension_loaded(“curl.so”))
dl(“curl.so”);
This load the PHP’s extention if it’s not.
I dont’ know if this is good for all hosting (depend of system, for my hosting is Apache/PHP on Linux), but perhaps this is a tip to add in a futur release of the plugin with other testing.
Happy new year !
Hi,
after testing my new good Tweet Old Post (see above), I see that:
tweets are send with success to my Twitter account with bit.ly short URL. But I don’t see the URLs in my bit.ly home page (history).
is this normal ?
@Jacques – Can you just confirm your bit.ly credentials.
@Ajay – My credentials are good. But is it not possible to test them directly from the plugin ?
@Jacques – I’ll check on that.
I have installed this, however every single time I try to configure it, it tells me I have the wrong twitter username and password ?? I have tried several times and I do Not have the wrong user/pass ??
please help
I’m on a new server now and I’m also getting the same error message below. I will try your remedy, but if there’s a fix for it that can be in a later update that would be better. There’s a lot of people using the bit.ly shortening service.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in /home/santale/public_html/games/wp-content/plugins/tweet-old-post/top-core.php on line 119
Nice plugin! Had a bit (not to make a pun) of a problem with bit.ly (top-core.php line 150 missing start entity) but searching for a while found that I had a trailing space on the copy/pasted API key. D’oh! That’s working now but I’m getting \403 Forbidden\ as the Story Title listed in the TweetDeck preview box and in the bit.ly History. The tweet itself has the expected post title, though, followed by the snippet and then the bit.ly URL and a different tweet posted through tr.im while I was debugging the line 150 error worked as expected, so I’m not sure what’s going on. Loading the bit.ly URL or the lengthened URL both work fine. Ideas?
Thanks!
Should’ve mentioned that I’m running 1.4 on WPMu 2.9.1. I edited the displayed title on the bit.ly history page and the ‘403 Forbidden’ on the TweetDeck preview just went blank. Better blank than 403 Forbidden, I suppose, but…
Using All in One SEO Pack on WP puts a pipe in the page title with the blog name following. Could bit.ly be choking on that or do you think it’s something else?
Thanks, again.
@Johnson – I’ll look into this and get back to you.
More data. Over the past few days bit.ly has been showing the URL in the Title field where the “403 Forbidden” has been appearing. Better than a 403 but still not exactly interesting. Today, it reverted to 403’s again. Didn’t change a thing on my end either time. ?
@Johnson – I couldn’t understand can you explain this in more detail.
It appeared to begin displaying correctly, all on its own, and then didn’t again.
@Johnson – I’ll check that and get back
Hey, ok, I get it, I guess – but does this really work?
@Zarabiaj – yes it works you can try that out
I am definitely bookmarking this page and sharing it with my friends. Well done!!!
I wonder how much smaller these threaded replies can get.
From the 403 error code, it would seem that there is something with access perms on either files or database that bit.ly is trying to access. Security is a big concern. Database is set to local-only, as it should be. No one outside my server should be accessing the database directly. What else is bit.ly trying to access that would give a 403? If someone could give me just a bit of information, I could look into things on my end. bit.ly support contact went on for a while but fell into a similar black hole when I asked for how their API works and what it is trying to access. If I can’t get any info, I can’t help.
In the mean time, I’m trying tr.im to see what happens there. If the same, that’ll tell me something at least.
On a side note, can the source be added to so that j.mp cam be used?
Thanks.
So I switch Tweet Old Post over from bit.ly to tr.im and the post titles are displayed correctly everywhere.
Now, after waiting a day to be sure that updates have a chance to get added, tr.im shows zero URLs in my account from tweets sent by TOP. Can I not win?
Johnson – I’ll add tr.im and j.mp to the list soon and update also will check out the problems you mention. Thanks for the comments and your precious feedback. Feel free to share your thoughts.
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I love the idea of this plugin. I have recently implemented and thought of a feature enhancement (that someone may have already suggested). It would be great to be able to set both a maximum age and an minimum age for the tweets, so that something that is very old might not be tweeted. So, I could configure something within 7 days (new) and 1 year (old).
Thanks!
-HTD
I have started working on it you’ll shortly get and update on it.
It seems that since the 1.5 update the other day, tweet old posts isn’t working correctly. When I tried the “Tweet Now” button, I saw this error at the top of the Tweet Old Posts Page:
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near …….
Any idea what all that means? It’s beyond me… but tweets stopped going out after the update, so i’m guessing it’s got something to do with that.
Any help is appreciated!
I’m getting the following error when attempting to save settings:
Fatal error: Cannot instantiate non-existent class: simplexmlelement in /media/html/wp-content/plugins/tweet-old-post/top-admin.php on line 377
I checked the top-admin.php file and line 377 is:
$xml = new SimpleXmlElement($response);
My server uses PHP 4.3.2
@Brad – Thanks for using Tweet Old Posts plugin. Yes SimpleXmlElement gives error under PHP 5. I’ll shortly update my plugin that will work with backward versions of PHP as well.
Since I upgraded to Wordpress 2.9.2 the Tweet Old Posts plugin has stopped working and is not updating my Twitter page.
[...] stumbled upon this brilliant wordpress plugin recently that resurrects that old content and brings it into the land of the [...]
Ajay,
Love this idea, but as I installed it (four different times) I get the same error.
Fatal error: Cannot instantiate non-existent class: simplexmlelement in /home/content/j/o/n/jonathanbrink/html/blog/wp-content/plugins/tweet-old-post/top-admin.php on line 377
Any help?
@Jonathan – That is because you are running old version of PHP. You get this error when you run PHP 4. However this runs fine in PHP 5.
I really like this Plugin… Can’t find anything else like it out there.
I was getting a similar error as an early commenter with the Shortener. I was using Bit.ly… When I changed to Tinyurl it worked just fine. So I think something is up with the Bit.ly…
Thanks again,
Ryan H.
Thanks for the help last time but now I have another one. I keep getting duplicate posts being put up on twitter randomly.
LOVE the plug in but I just found out that the tweets made aren’t including a link? Any thoughts? (Latest WP and Plugin)
Thanks!
I like this plugin very much.
But I would like to add http://1click.at as URL shortening service.
Any tipps on that?
Doesn’t work.
When pressing the button to store my settings the screen stay blank and the settings are NOT stored!
I tested again on another server. Now it works. I have no clue why. The only thing I changed was the shortener service.
What about a function to auto insert the tags as #tags?
I’ve been using this plug-in since it came out really. Suddenly about a week ago, it stopped tweeting. Even if I hit the “Tweet Now” button, no dice. Any ideas?
@Dustin – Try changing some of the options, specially the max age limit set to none if its already none try setting it to 365 days and check if it works. Feel free to get back to me in case it doesn’t works.
I have implemented 1click.at … works great
can i Tweet Old Post Only in category page… not in frontpage ???
When i installed this i got this error ?
Fatal error: Cannot instantiate non-existent class: simplexmlelement in F:\hshome\anncoona\smarterdimensions.com\blog\wp-content\plugins\tweet-old-post\top-admin.php on line 377
Any thoughts ?
@SmarterDimensions – This may be because you are running older version of PHP this class is supported from PHP 5 onwards.
drat …another reason to get anther provider … Thanks for the update …
If we pay you money, how much would it take to recode it to work in PHP 4?