Sure. Yes, yes and yes. The application of the plugin is completely subjective so get creative with it! :)

As a sidenote, I’ve gotten a handful of “pitches” so far. Only one real pitch. Everyone else is kicking the tires – which is fun. I like getting anonymous tweets to my direct message box.

In the words of Instapundit… heh.

Examples of such entertainment include:

• You should only post about Erin, Queen of Spain, forever. Why? Um…’cause she said so. I think I need this. stupid PR can pitch me here
• Hey Aaron, great idea. Much better than the tons of spam we’re now gettting via the technosailor tips hotline. Congrats! Editorial Note: this person must be a technosailor.com writer getting general emails to the tips@technosailor.com – we like real tips, not spam, by the way.
• Sorry, just testing your plugin.
• So does this go direct to you as a dm or something? Cool.
• Hello God! Editorial Note: this one is my favorite.

Good times. I imagine real pitching will happen over time and I’ll suffer the anonymous stuff for awhile. :-)

Thus, the Twitter Pitch was born.

I’m releasing a new plugin that I hacked together over the weekend called WP-Twitterpitch that I’m also running here at Technosailor. Check out the navigation for a demo.

WP-TwitterPitch is all about getting the pitch delivered to you in the form you want to get it delivered – in other words in Twitter format. If you’re like me, then your Twitter direct message box is a lot like your email inbox. Personally, I don’t want to get pitches from PR companies in certain email inboxes. For whatever reason, I may not check them or they are personal, etc.

Twitter, however, provides the ultimate quick-messaging system. This plugin provides a template tag that you can drop anywhere in your theme. Clicking the link provides lightbox-like functionality for a “pitch form”. Using the form does not require a Twitter account (but does require that you have a secondary Twitter account you can use for this purpose, since you can’t send Direct Messages to yourself via Twitter). Note: Your WP-TwitterPitch Twitter account must follow the account that is being pitched and vica versa. This is a one-off action (hopefully, depending on Twitter) and only needs to be done when setting up WP-TwitterPitch.

Messages sent from the form are DMmed to the account getting the pitch and the form is limited to 140 characters or less. The beauty of linguistic efficiency.

Installation

1. Upload the

   1	wp-twitterpitch

   folder to the

   1	/wp-content/plugins/

   directory

2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Edit Admin options to include Twitter ID to pitch, Twitter ID and Password to send Twitter pitches

as, as well as a message to “pitchers” that will be displayed in the form after the pitch has been sent.

Place wherever you want the link to appear

Direct Download Link

It’s customary practice to release entries to limited recipients for early review or to gain publicity on the entry early. This plugin is labelled alpha and is feature-limited at the moment. To use, simply:

1. Download the zip archive and extract
2. Upload to your WordPress plugins directory
3. Activate
4. Insert an

   1

   somewhere inside the Loop. The link will only be visible to administrators.

There are future features planned for this including WordPress admin integration and options, but I felt it was important to make an alpha release.

This plugin is not supported in its current state, though feature ideas and feedback are welcome. This has been tested on WP 2.1 and development versions of WP but I see no reason why it would not be compatible in earlier versions.

Screenshots

How do I use the new version of the Amazon plugin? It never brings up what I am looking for and its very annoying. I want to be able to use it the way it was before the WP upgrade.

This question comes from Shannon Nelson who is complaining about the new version of WP-Amazon. Many of the blogs at b5 are product based or have a strong connection to products and so the WP-Amazon plugin is a favorite among affiliate bloggers.

The problem is that the new version of WP-Amazon, though still beta, leaves a large chunk of the less technical population behind. Based on the plugin site, I’m confident that the issues will be resolved by the time this version comes out of beta, however until then we’re stuck with it. The stable version of the plugin does not work on any of the WP 2.1.x branch and the beta preview version is only compati ble with Firefox 2, Opera 9 and (I think) Safari. Internet Explorer users are the big losers here.

Stay tuned tot he plugin page for news on future releases and we’ll be proactively monitoring and upgrading here at b5media.

For those who wish to download and test (please do!), you can do so via SVN:

Or download the nightly.

I am looking to take this plugin to the next level and build features so speak up if you want features. Hart, this means you. And anyone else. :-)

This version is a bugfix version addressing issues of unassociated comments and unassociated categories. This should be considered a beta release until I get more user feedback.

To use, upload

to your WordPress blog in the

directory.