“Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie…”
– Sing a Song of Sixpence, popular nursery rhyme*
Growing up, we all sang the familiar song. Thankfully, I’ve never tasted blackbird pie (nor do I desire to). I never even really thought much about what I was singing as a child, otherwise I might have gagged.
Fortunately, there’s a new kind of Blackbird Pie that’s actually quite tasty. I’m referring of course to the fantastic Blackbird Pie plugin for WordPress.
The Blackbird Pie plugin let’s you easily quote a tweet with the links and look of the original tweet, like this:
[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/jeffhester/status/39511689892339712″]
Blackbird Pie adds an icon to the TinyMCE visual editor. When you are editing your post, click the Blackbird button and you’ll see a screen that let’s you paste in the URL to the tweet you want to share, or search for a tweet.
Here’s the dialog for inserting a tweet:
The sweet thing about Blackbird Pie is that all the links that would be “live” in the original tweet are live in your post as well, including linked Twitter handles, the client used and any links.
The Twitter API is called only the first time. The generated HTML is stored in a hidden custom field so subsequent loads won’t rely on Twitter uptime.
If you ever have occasion to post a tweet on your WordPress-powered website, Blackbird Pie is a must-have plugin. And it’s also supported on WordPress.com, too!
*Incidentally, some say the 24 blackbirds baked in a pie refers to an actual historical event. Who knew?!
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