Twitter’s new tool, Blackbird Pie, is designed to help people pull tweets into blog posts and other text. I’d often thought of putting something like this together, but I figured someone had already created it. After a quick search, I found at least one other WordPress plugin that had done it (last year). I’m sure there are several others out there.

Twitter’s tool is okay. It got off to a rocky start yesterday when something was going wrong on the Twitter servers, but I guess things happen. The tool creates some very nice looking output, but it still feels a little unwieldy and I don’t think it will get much use until the next version.

My buddy, Ike Pigott (@ikepigott), decided that I didn’t have anything better to do today, so he challenged me, “This SCREAMS for plugin integration,” he said. I agreed and set about coding a prototype in javascript at http://clickablenow.com/tweetform.aspx.

I took the code from that page and added it to my Twit Connect plugin. The plugin will now include BBCode that will replace [ tweet ] tags with nicely formatted tweets. Although it’s not quite as fancy as the Twitter code, I think many of the links in the Twitter code are unnecessary. I decided to make it simple and more flexible. Just go to Search.Twitter.Com, copy a few tweets, paste them into a WordPress post and the plugin will format them for you. — Notice I said “tweets.” Yes, you can pull multiple tweets from the search page and it formats all of them inside a single [ tweet ] block.

I’ll post the new Twit Connect version soon. For now, the tweets below demonstrate the working code. The tweet template (including all the styles) is configurable through the setup page.