After experimenting with a solution, it seems the best way round it is simply to store the numbers as strings of text, which we’re now doing. So the good news is, you should be able to repaste tweets that have already been pasted. The bad news is that some tweets pasted before today will be plagued by the same problem.

But staying positive, TweetPaste is bags more scalable than it was only a couple of hours ago. Vive le tweets!

It couldn’t be simpler to use, too. Just download it from wordpress.org (or directly from your WordPress admin area by searching the Plugins directory for “tweetpaste”), install and activate it, then use the shortcode [tweet url=%url%], replacing %url% with the address of the tweet you want to embed.

If you’re not sure how to get that address, just find the tweet on twitter.com, click the timestamp underneath the body of the tweet, and copy the URL that’s in your address bar. If you want to save space, you can even use [tweet id=%id%], replacing %id% with the string of numbers at the end of the tweet URL.

You can customise the width of the tweet box from the Settings > Embeded tweets menu item, and specify any of the options in the TweetPaste API in your [tweet] shortcode.

And don’t worry about maxing out your server with lots of expensive calls to TweetPaste. The plugin caches the results of the API call, which means you get the best of both worlds: if we make changes to the way tweets are displayed, you’ll see them instantly because it’s using JavaScript, and because that call is made by the user’s browser, your server only makes a call to TweetPaste the first time you embed a tweet, or change the formatting options.

But as always, the system is totally accessible. Users who don’t have JavaScript get pretty much exactly the same experience as those with.

So have a play, and let me know what you think in the comments. If you like it, please rate it highly!

Stuff I’d like to add

I want to be able to let you guys clear your cache, incase we make a major update to TweetPaste meaning the API generates new embed code. I’m quite new to WordPress plugins but only build stuff to best practices where possible, so I need to find out the agreed way of doing this. If you know, tweet me yeah?

There are some big improvements to TweetPaste itself that I’d like to make, but we’ll come to those later.

http://tweetpaste.thingamaweb.com/api/gethtml/

and passing in the following arguments:

When you call the function, you’ll receive an HTTP response which contains just the HTML code you need to render in your application. If an error is caused, you should receive a response beginning with “ERROR: ”.

It’s in its absolute infancy, so if you experience any problems please let me know via the comments.

Soon you’ll be able to customise the look of the embeddable box the app produces. You can change the width and height (although the height will magically auto-expand for longer tweets), and hide certain areas you don’t need (like the user details, avatar and time etc). This is really handy if you want to display a lot of tweets on the same page.

You can choose whether to show or hide the background colour, which now matches the colour chosen in the twitterer’s user profile.

Also there’s a new bookmarklet on the way, which will give you a handy shortcut and save you the RSI involved in copying and pasting lots of URLs!

And on the WordPress front, there’ll be a new, version-controlled plugin. That does mean you’ll have to deactivate the one you’re currently using and install the new one when it arrives, but the good news is that, because it’s registered with WordPress, you’ll be able to upgrade to future versions directly from your dashboard.

The system’s been completely rewritten in a new language, so should be bags more reliable, and it is the second to join Bluemilkshake’s happy band of Thingamawebs: small projects built in Django.

So expect new things within the next week or so.
Relax, and enjoy your tweets.

Expect a full, version-controlled WordPress plugin soon.
Thanks for your patience!

1. Just like twitter.com, the time is now a permalink to the original tweet (thanks Mike Bogle). The timing accuracy has also been improved, so a tweet posted 30 minutes ago will show “30 minutes ago” instead of “about an hour ago”
2. Allow SSL tweets (ie: tweets whose URL begins with “https://”) to be embedded (thanks Jeton)
3. Slightly better error handling

I’ve refreshed the cache so you should see immediate effect.

Still to do:

1. Get the WordPress plugin onto wordpress.org’s CVS. Subscribe to our Twitter feed to find out when that’s available as you’ll need to deactivate the original plugin and install the new one, which henceforth will be version-controlled.

Thanks a bunch to everyone who’s written about the project so far. We’ve had nearly 200 tweets embedded around the Web, and I hope that number will just keep growing!

Really pleased to have got it all written in less than 12 hours. It’s a simple idea, so that helps. Still got lots to do on it though, like allowing users to customise the appearance of the embedded tweet and listing the tweets that have just been embedded, but it’s a start!

Got any features you want added?