Experimenting with the Social plugin for WordPress

When I installed the FavePersonal theme for my weblog, it included the Social plugin for WordPress. I did some experiments with the Twitter broadcast mode, making posts using the Status tab in the editor.

 

I entered text and a URL at the end, but my weblog did not display the link as active:

 

The link did appear active in Twitter, though:

 

Next, I entered text and a link again, and this one did display the link on the weblog:

 

I think that the problem was that there was a colon before the link in the first example, I will have to perform some more tests for that problem.

I also decided to change the template for the tweet. Here is how the initial default setting appears in the Social settings page:

 

The format is:

{title}: {content} {url}

This resulted in this tweet:

I decided to remove the URL field so that it now looks like:

{title}: {content}

This resulted in this tweet:

I started adding more than 140 characters to see if the Social plugin would shorten the URL at the end of the post, but it did not perform any shortening. If I want to shorten URLs in a post, it looks like I will need to find a URL shortener plugin or use a service like Bitly.

Overall, the Social plugin meets my needs (I don’t have a Facebook account, so I don’t know how well that part works). I will probably try other plugins like Jetpack to see how they work.