One of the nice knock-on effects of chicken forcing me to get her blog off the ground is that I have started fiddling with tech again. As exciting as this mostly is, it is also proving to be a little frustrating at times. Kind of like right now.
I have spent the past few days intermittently looking for a nice (read stable, light and basic) twitter widget for wordpress (I feel a little odd saying this, but yes, chicken tweets). After a few failed attempts resulting in me being sucked into the intertubes, I finally pick what I think is the winning widget. I jauntily click the install link and prepare to watch in utter amazement as chicken clucks and a tweet appears. Ok, not really, but I did have pretty high hopes.
After abandoning that widget after figuring out what they meant about this WP version being bleeding edge, I set off with renewed determination to find a plugin tested against this here bleeding edge version. Lo and behold, there it is. Complete with shining endorsements based on the quick spot check I did and suitably crisp documentation. Did I mention a 5 star user rating? (What was that about lemmings again?)
Once again I find myself, finger poised above the install link and hope gurgling like slight heartburn, deep in my chest. I take the leap, click the link and set off to configure it. I am suitably impressed! Just like that crunchy, or was it crispy? documentation promised, a simple, intuitive interface allowing me to control exactly what and how I want to display the clucks (surely that’s a more suitable verb for chicken). In principle, it is beautiful.
I save my changes and cannot ctrl-tab-4-F5 fast enough.
I F5 again. Wait. Let me rather make that a ctrl-F5, one can never be too certain.
Finally when I could no longer fool myself that the page was indeed reloading and that no, there was still no twitter feed, I head back to admin to poke. Oh look at that. Widget doesn’t seem to save. So I try again – I mean, perhaps I clicked cancel, thinking it was save. I painstakingly pay careful attention to each and every keystroke and satisfied that all is well and click save. And this time I am 100% sure it was save.
This time around I am spared the hope-disguised-as-heartburn and twack the F5. No suprise, there is no difference. *sigh* My mind vaguely latches onto something I remember running across regarding pulling tweets in as RSS feeds. Not ideal but I figure it will suffice until I get to the bottom of this plugin business.
So that’s what I did. And I was mostly happy with the result (it was an interim solution after all). Sure each tweet is its own link, there is no control over format not to mention no twitter functionality such as replies or retweets. Yet it is functional. Or at least it was.
I notice this evening that chicken kindly clucked and thought I would check it out on her blog. Could I believe my eyes when that latest tweet was not there? I can promise there has been much ctrl-function-keying.
I will get to the bottom of this. I will get a beautifully sleek and functional plugin or baring this, I will downgrade to the latest stable version of wordpress. 
