TweetPaste RIP

A note from future Mark (11/08/2018)

Moxy is the name I went by, from late 2009 til early 2012. TweetPaste is a tool that predated Twitter's oEmbed support (the ability to embed a tweet into a blog post without taking a screenshot). TweetPaste was one of, if not the first, of its kind, and was my first successful freelance project.

TweetPaste, my webapp for embedding tweets has been down for weeks now - by choice - so it's about time I made a formal announcement to say that, I'm afraid it won't be coming back any time soon.

I built it in 2008 and it ran for about 2 years, and got some use which made me pleased, but between paying for two domain names (tweetpaste.net and thingamaweb.com), and dealing with what happens when demand gets high and my inbox is bombarded with errors from requests that can't be fulfilled (due to Twitter throttling), it's become a bit too much to handle, but more importantly, it's no longer the best tool for the job.

Twitter supports oEmbed, a technology adopted by WordPress and many others, for embedding content from a simple URL, rather than through unwieldy slabs of HTML. embed.ly is a great tool that puts a lot of that power in the pockets for those either not on WordPress, or for those who want to use oEmbed consumers that WordPress isn't familiar with. With these types of technologies, you simply put the URL of a tweet directly into your post, hit Publish and you 're done. That's brilliant. Not all solutions are as accessible as TweetPaste was, but it's still fairly early days.

Thank you to the thousands of people who used TweetPaste to enrich their content, and if you need any help or advice switching over, please let me know. You can find me on Twitter as @moxypark.