Since launching my implementation of TweetBacks a few days ago, the response has been much larger than I expected (in fact Twitter CEO Evan Williams remarked that he had just drawn TweetBacks on the Twitter whiteboard a few weeks ago), and the guys at MediaTemple have been great in working with me to help scale the server to meet the demand.

Remember that this is still beta, and the first time you view a page that has TweetBacks installed on it, the script will take a moment to load, subsequent views of the page will be fast. If you’ve installed TweetBacks on your blog, please leave your URL in a comment. I’d love to see how it looks out in the wild.

To install, just copy and paste this JavaScript into your template/theme where you want your TweetBacks to appear:

<script src="http://danzarrella.com/tb.js?stats=true"></script>

I’ve just released a TweetBacks WordPress Plugin.

I’ve been listening to what people have said about TweetBacks and have implemented a few new features in response to the great feedback I’ve gotten.

First up are the 6 new configuration options I’ve added, allowing users to customize how TweetBacks are displayed on their blogs.

New Configuration Options:

1. Option to display only the number of TweetBacks (countonly=true)
2. Option to limit the max number of TweetBacks shown (max=10)
3. Option to hide user avatars (noavatars=true)
4. Ability to hide TweetBacks from certain users (blockedusers=user1+user2)
5. Switch to turn off all styling other than avatar (nostyle=true)
6. Switch to turn off the title (notitle=true)

You can use these configuration options by including them in the URL you use to call my TweetBacks javascript in your template like this (they can go in any order and you block as many users as you want):

<script src="http://danzarrella.com/tb.js?noavatars=true&countonly=true&max=10&blockedusers=user1+user2&nostyle=true&notitle=true&stats=true"></script>

TweetStats (statistics about TweetBacks of your content).

Additionally, I began building a system to report stats on TweetBacks. The first feature is a list of the most Tweeted posts on your site (you can see it in action in my side bar under “Most Tweeted”), it works like this:

<script src="http://danzarrella.com/tsjs.php?max=5"></script>

Just copy and paste that code into the sidebar of your template. You can change the styling of the list is displays via CSS:

div#mostTweeted {
font-size:12px;
}

In order to take advantage of this, you have to turn on the “stats” feature in TweetBacks by appending stats=true to your TweetBack script as seen above. By default the sidebar script will use the contents of the page’s <title> tag as the link text, but you can customize this by proving the TweetBack script with a title parameter. WordPress users can easily use code like this:

<script src="http://danzarrella.com/tb.js?noavatars=true&countonly=true&max=10&blockedusers=user1+user2&stats=true&title=<?php urlencode(the_title()); ?>"></script>

This script has one option so far: the maximum number of posts to show. By default it will show 5.

I also added and changed a few things users had requested, as well as fixed a couple of bugs that had been affecting some sites:

Changes & Additions:

• Removed the link to the specific tweet’s URL
• Added the date the tweet was posted on
• Added support for tr.im

Bug Fixes:

• Total TweetBacks number matches actual number of tweets
• is.gd and bit.ly support is now functional

Future plans include integration with my ReTweet mapping system. Over 70% of all ReTweets contain a link, meaning the majority of them are actually TweetBacks. By using my TweetBacks script, you’ll be able to track (and map) the spread of your content through Twitter through normal TweetBacks as well as ReTweets.