The Fearless Blogger

In the past couple of weeks a number of WordPress plugins have been surfacing to search and “collect” tweets which include blog links so that they can be displayed with the corresponding blog post.

I’m a big fan of anything that helps consolidate the conversation and give a blogger visibility to any response/reaction to what they write.  I’ve been looking at the various Twitter/WordPress tools, both to find the best to include here as well as to write a review of what’s out there.

I’ve not yet played with them all, but regardless of what’s out there, I’m thinking (hoping) my search is over.

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If all goes well, I’m sticking with Chat Catcher.

My decision has nothing to do with bells and whistles – it boils down to one word:

SERVICE

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Chat Catcher scans Twitter for references to your blog posts. When someone links to your blog, that tweet will be posted to your blog’s comments.

Since the fisrt night I installed the alpha version of the script, its developer (Shannon Whitley, who also created My Tweeple) has been incredibly responsive to my questions and suggestions.  A fair expectation for any product perhaps – yet one that is often (understandably) not met when scripts are developed by moonlighting developers who are sharing their plugins and scripts for free.

It’s Shannon’s proactive follow-up that has impressed me.  Part of Chat Catcher’s set up involves registering your blog. Shannon has sent me email alerts any time my blog showed an error.   These emails are not auto-generated alerts – Shannon included his suggestions on how to fix the issue and offered assistance (keep in mind the script is in beta, so a few errors are par for the course).  Shannon also communicates any recent improvements he’s made to the script and instructions on how to implement them.

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Being a needy gal with a fondness for attention, this developer is my kind of guy.

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Shannon has just released a WordPress plugin for the service.  Setup is extremely simple: register your blog, install the plugin,  tweak as desired and you’re ready to go.  Options include having tweets appear as trackbacks or comments, excluding specific senders (e.g., your own tweets or any spammers) and the ability to submit the comments as administrator (choosing not to allows for additional comment moderation).

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Worth mentioning

• The service works with any type of blog.
•  It will process links on Twitter from any url shortening service (tinyurl.com, bit.ly, is.gd, twurl, etc.).
• The name does not start with “Tw”.  Since Shannon made a point of mentioning that in his blog post, my hope is this means he has plans to expand the service beyond Twitter.
• Chat Catch also has an RSS look up service – handy if you want to capture tweets about your blog posts and share them in your sidebar.
• You do not need to provide any log on or password information for Chat Catcher to function.
• Shannon has a couple of new features in the works – stay tuned!

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I have the plugin installed now.  To see it in action/help me test it, tweet a link to this post (you can use the shortened url: http://bitly.com/chatcatch) and check back to see your tweet in the comments.  

For more information, visit the site at chatcatcher.com.

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