A few months ago I set out to better integrate this blog with Facebook and Twitter. I don’t mess around with the internals of WordPress, so I needed to find plugins to provide the features I wanted. The first thing I tried was the Twitter Tools plugin by Alex King (Crowd Favorite). This enabled me to automatically tweet a link to the blog when a new post was generated.
Some time later I installed the Social plugin, which had the capability to send new post notifications to my Twitter account and my Facebook account. I think it was also supposed to pull in comments from FB and Twitter, but that never worked for me. I should point out that all this was done with the Carrington blog theme.
I think Carrington is a powerful, very customizable theme, but like I noted above, I don’t mess with the internals of WP. So my blog looked like generic Carrington, just like every other non-customized Carrington blog. So, I also wanted to have a blog design that was a little more unique to me.
A few weeks ago, Social and Twitter Tools were more or less merged and upgraded to a new version. They still didn’t work right on my WP installation, or rather, the FB part of it didn’t work.
I searched some more for a FB related plugin, and found Wordbooker. I was attracted to this plugin because the developer is very active in supporting it, and it seemed to have all the features I wanted. I installed and tried it. The bottom line was, I couldn’t quite get it to work. It’s got a ton of setup options, so perhaps I just didn’t get it set up correctly.
So I reinstalled Social and Twitter Tools, and now, they worked. Go figure! Except, the formatting of the comments pulled back from FB and Twitter didn’t play well with the Carrington theme. Trying to find a good theme from the thousands available is a daunting task, so I fell back to what I had some experience with and chose the Atahualpa theme. I’ve tinkered with it a bit to add my own header images and used a couple of Google fonts (Ubuntu for headlines and Lato for body text) to slightly customize it. Even better, the Social and Twitter Tools plugins seemed to play nicely with it.
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