Our Twitter feed includes notification each time we publish a post here on WPHacks.com, but as an added bonus, you will also get some retweets of our favorite WordPress-related content published by others. 

Note:  If you’d like to follow my personal tweets also, you can do so here.  (@KyleEslick)

While searching for a WordPress plugin that could automatically publish my blog posts on Twitter, I was thrilled to discover the WordTwit WordPress plugin.    With this plugin, simply upload and activate, then enter the Twitter login information for the account you want the tweets to appear under.   Once done, all your WordPress posts will start to appear on your Twitter account (almost instantly from my experience).

[Download the WordTwit WordPress Plugin]

Here is what Matt had to say about the acquisition of WP.com:

Yes it’s true, Automattic is now the proud owner of WP.com, which we acquired from our buddies over at Yahoo! We’ve been using WP.com as internal shorthand for this site for years now, and ever since we figured out four or five years ago that Yahoo had that domain (as opposed to the Washington Post or something) we’ve been doing our best to get it, a journey that culminated in ultimate success a few days ago.

WP.com seemed like a great fit: people’s attention spans are getting shorter every day.  Wow the weather is great in San Francisco today. Also it’s seven keystrokes shorter to type in, which multiplied by the hundreds of millions of times people visit the site every year will be a huge productivity boost to our troubled economy and prevent RSI in a large percentage of the population.

Matt has also thrown a question out to the WordPress community.    What should they do with this outstanding domain name?   You can leave a comment on their post here with your suggestion!

My recommendation?   People are going completely mobile these days for everything and that trend is only going to continue over time.   After seeing what is in store for the iPhone 3.0 and the BlackBerry Storm 2.0, I am as convinced of this as ever.   At the same time, people are also loving Twitter and sending Tweets from their phones.

Why not take WP.com and build it into a mobile blogging platform, or a Twitter competitor of some sort that ties into your WordPress.com blog?     What other ideas do you guys have?

Note: It appears Automattic has also acquired Blo.gs.  It will be interesting to see if they decide to try to improve or somehow integrate this service.

I was excited to see our friend Jean-Baptiste Jung make the list, showing he is finally getting the recognition his hard work deserves.   There are also a number of other people included in the list that are worth following, so Twitter users will want to make sure to check Theme Playground’s post.

Back when Twitter was originally launched, I setup an account just like many of you, but I can’t say I use the service as often as a lot of people do.  Maybe it is because I don’t find my own musings as interesting as I find others, or maybe it is the timesink that Twitter can be (just like Facebook), but I just don’t use it as much as I should.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my phone to the new Blackberry Storm (which I could write a four page review of how incredible this phone is) and grabbed the TwitterBerry application.   I’ve found that this application has really helped motivate me to use the service a lot more often now that I can easily keep up with things while I’m away from my computer.  

Because I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned my profile here on WordPress Hacks, I figured now was as good of time as any.  If anyone is interested in following me on Twitter, you can follow me here.

I’m also sure many of you have Twitter accounts and I’d love to keep up with what our readers are doing.   If you’d like me to follow you, leave your profile link in the comments.

One trend we are starting to see more often lately is Twitter being integrated into WordPress blogs.  In the past we’ve featured a couple methods to integrate Twitter into your blog such as How to Add a “Tweet This” Link To Your Blog and How to Display Most Recent Twitter Entry.   Even more recently there have been some WordPress plugins released to further integrate Twitter into your WordPress blog:

1. Tweetbacks – This recent plugin by our friend Joost De Valk displays any “tweets” about your blog post below that post in the same way trackbacks/pingbacks are often displayed on WordPress blogs.   You can read more information about the plugin and how to install it here.  A similar plugin called TweetSuite was released recently as well.
2. Twitter Comments – Works similar to Gravatars, but displays the comment author’s Twitter avatar instead.  If a Twitter avatar is not available, it will then attempt to locate a Gravatar to use instead.

Due to the popularity of WordPress, I would imagine this is only the tip of the iceberg and many more Twitter WordPress plugins will follow over the coming months/years.   Out of curiosity, for those of you that are heavy Twitter users, what have you done to integrate Twitter into your WordPress blog?

Update: I just ran across this post over at Profit Blogger which shares more than 20 Twitter WordPress plugins that already exist.

A popular example is Digg.  If visitors come from Digg.com, they will see a message reminding them to Digg the post!   If you have a Twitter account, you can also setup a custom message to show people visiting from Twitter reminding them to “Tweet” your post or to follow you on Twitter.  This plugin also works for visitors via Google search, etc.

For everyone else, you have the option of setting a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Greet Box Plugin Features:

• Compatible with various WordPress cache plugins so you do not have to sacrifice speed.
• Show a different greeting message to your visitor depending on the referrer URL. You can add/edit/delete/disable these greeting messages as you choose.
• Detect the visitor’s search keywords and use those keywords to display related posts.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not match any of your configured referrer URL.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not have JavaScript enabled.
• AJAX greeting message in the front-end makes it compatible with caching plugins and WPMU.
• AJAX administrative interface that uses nonce verification to discourage hackers.
• Ability to set a timeout to forget a visitor so we do not keep nagging them with greeting messages.
• Ability to setup regular expression rules to exclude some referrer URLs from seeing greeting messages.
• Ultra customizable greeting message box (with CSS) allowing you to prepend/append HTML around the greeting message box.
• Currently the following traffic referrers are in Greet Box by default (you can easily create your own if your favorite referrer is not on the list):
  1. Delicious
  2. Digg
  3. Google
  4. Yahoo
  5. StumbleUpon
  6. Technorati
  7. Twitter

You can download Greet Box here.   If you’d like to check out some of the other WordPress plugins we’ve featured in the past, you can check out our WordPress Plugins page.

In his latest recipe, Jean explains how to add a “Send to Twitter” link to your blog, or what I prefer to call it, a “Tweet This!” link.   The idea is to add a link on your blog (usually below the content) that people can simply click to discuss the post on Twitter.

If you’d like to add a “Tweet This!” link to your blog, here is the code you’ll need:

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Click to send this page to Twitter!" target="_blank">Tweet This!</a>

I would think that this could potentially be another great way to fetch traffic, possibly even better than a “Digg This!” link or something else along those lines.