Steps for writing a Twitter summary conference blog post

Last updated on Tue, Jul 11, 2023 6 min read Conference, rstats

I recently wrote several blog posts with many tweets¹ as a way of taking notes during the American Society of Human Genetics 2018 conference. A few friends asked me how I did this so fast. The process can be summarized into the following main steps.

Save links of tweets you want to highlight in your post.
Use a hugo-powered blog to obtain the code for embedding tweets easily².
Proofread, edit and post.

My steps detailed

Here’s the actual process I used.

Identify the conference Twitter hashtag. In my recent case, that was ASHG18.
Create a Google doc or some other simple text file you can access easily from your phone and laptop.
While in a presentation, check the latest tweets for the given hashtag. ASGH18 example.

Copy the link of any tweet you find interesting. If there are none for the session you are in, consider writing some tweets yourself with the conference hashtag!

Paste the link into your Google doc.

Once the day is over, copy-paste the contents of your Google doc into a text editor that has the ability to find and replace using regular expressions. For example, TextMate.

Find and replace to create the syntax for embedding tweets. I’ll cover more of this in detail in the next section.

Find:

https://twitter.com/.*/status/

and replace by:

\n`r blogdown::shortcode("tweet", "

Then find:

\?s=[0-9]*

and replace by:

")`\n

Our file now looks like this:

Add any comments you wish, format the headings and proofread.
Make it public and tweet about your post with the conference hashtag!

And you are done! 🙌🏽🎉

Quick embedding

Note that my blog is powered by blogdown (Xie, Hill, and Thomas, 2017) which has the function blogdown::shortcode() for embedding tweets. For example, blogdown::shortcode("tweet", user="lcolladotor", id="1054380320533950464") generates the hugo syntax code which then hugo renders into the tweet itself.

I just completed my #ASHG18 survey @GeneticsSociety. Took a few minutes and most of my feedback wouldn't stand out. Except that I did use a box to suggest having a webinar with role playing scenarios that exemplify how the code of conduct can be used to diffuse harassment @jsdron pic.twitter.com/AKZdnGCr25
— 🇲🇽 Leonardo Collado-Torres (@lcolladotor) October 22, 2018

As an alternative, we can use Twitter itself by copy-pasting the code for embedding the tweet directly from the Twitter app/website. On the top right side menu on the tweet itself, select Embed Tweet

then copy-paste the HTML code into your post.

Here’s the code:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I just completed my <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ASHG18?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#ASHG18</a> survey <a href="https://twitter.com/GeneticsSociety?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@GeneticsSociety</a>. Took a few minutes and most of my feedback wouldn&#39;t stand out. Except that I did use a box to suggest having a webinar with role playing scenarios that exemplify how the code of conduct can be used to diffuse harassment <a href="https://twitter.com/jsdron?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jsdron</a> <a href="https://t.co/AKZdnGCr25">pic.twitter.com/AKZdnGCr25</a></p>&mdash; 🇲🇽 Dr. Leonardo Collado-Torres (@fellgernon) <a href="https://twitter.com/lcolladotor/status/1054380320533950464?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 22, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

and here is how it looks:

I just completed my \#ASHG18 survey (**GeneticsSociety?**). Took a few minutes and most of my feedback wouldn't stand out. Except that I did use a box to suggest having a webinar with role playing scenarios that exemplify how the code of conduct can be used to diffuse harassment (**jsdron?**) pic.twitter.com/AKZdnGCr25
— 🇲🇽 Dr. Leonardo Collado-Torres ((**fellgernon?**)) October 22, 2018

There might be other ways of doing this that are specific to your blog platform.

I also imagine that it should be possible to bookmark the tweets on Twitter and then use an R package to extract your bookmarked tweets from the past 24 hours in order to simplify the process. Maybe this can be done with rtweet although I haven’t dived into it.

New to `blogdown`?

Check:

Also, ask around. You might belong to a group or know someone that is willing to host a guest post in their blogdown blog. For example:

Acknowledgments

This blog post was made possible thanks to:

BiocStyle (Oleś, 2023)
blogdown (Xie, Hill, and Thomas, 2017)
knitcitations (Boettiger, 2021)
sessioninfo (Wickham, Chang, Flight, Müller et al., 2021)

References

\[1\] C. Boettiger. knitcitations: Citations for ‘Knitr’ Markdown Files. R package version 1.0.12. 2021. URL: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=knitcitations.

\[2\] A. Oleś. BiocStyle: Standard styles for vignettes and other Bioconductor documents. R package version 2.28.0. 2023. DOI: 10.18129/B9.bioc.BiocStyle. URL: https://bioconductor.org/packages/BiocStyle.

\[3\] H. Wickham, W. Chang, R. Flight, K. Müller, et al. sessioninfo: R Session Information. R package version 1.2.2. 2021. URL: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=sessioninfo.

\[4\] Y. Xie, A. P. Hill, and A. Thomas. blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2017. ISBN: 978-0815363729. URL: https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/.

Reproducibility

## ─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
##  setting  value
##  version  R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16)
##  os       macOS Ventura 13.4
##  system   aarch64, darwin20
##  ui       X11
##  language (EN)
##  collate  en_US.UTF-8
##  ctype    en_US.UTF-8
##  tz       America/New_York
##  date     2023-07-11
##  pandoc   3.1.5 @ /opt/homebrew/bin/ (via rmarkdown)
## 
## ─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
##  package       * version    date (UTC) lib source
##  backports       1.4.1      2021-12-13 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
##  bibtex          0.5.1      2023-01-26 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
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##  BiocStyle     * 2.28.0     2023-04-25 [1] Bioconductor
##  blogdown        1.18       2023-06-19 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
##  bookdown        0.34       2023-05-09 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
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##  jquerylib       0.1.4      2021-04-26 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
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##  rlang           1.1.1      2023-04-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
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##  sass            0.4.6.9000 2023-05-06 [1] Github (rstudio/sass@f248fe5)
##  sessioninfo   * 1.2.2      2021-12-06 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
##  stringi         1.7.12     2023-01-11 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
##  stringr         1.5.0      2022-12-02 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
##  timechange      0.2.0      2023-01-11 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
##  xfun            0.39       2023-04-20 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
##  xml2            1.3.4      2023-04-27 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
##  yaml            2.3.7      2023-01-23 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)
## 
##  [1] /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/library
## 
## ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

ASHG18 day 1 post, day 2, day 3, day 4 and day 5. ↩︎
Or any other tool that can get you the embedding code, including the Twitter page itself. ↩︎

ASHG Blog rstats

Leonardo Collado-Torres

Investigator @ LIBD, Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics @ JHBSPH

#rstats @Bioconductor/🧠 genomics @LieberInstitute/@lcgunam @jhubiostat @jtleek @andrewejaffe alumni/@LIBDrstats @CDSBMexico co-founder