How to tell WordPress to stop turning a Twitter URL into an embedded tweet

This is the story of a poor UI that wasted three hours of my life, & how I fixed it. It’s here so you hopefully don’t have the same experience.

In my post from a few weeks ago, I talked about my modifications to a Python script for backing up my tweets. Throughout the post (which was written in Markdown, of course), I had lines like this, showing what the backed-up tweets look like:

Fascinating article about collecting opium antiques & then becoming an opium addict: http://t.co/0Un3Wbdo Lots of interesting pictures too.
September 30, 2012 at 2:43 PM
http://twitter.com/scottgranneman/status/252493821378707456

There was one problem: when I previewed the post, it looked like this (click to see a larger version):

Not what I wanted at all. What the hell? An embedded tweet? I tried everything, but nothing I did worked. No matter what I changed, I still saw an embedded tweet instead of a link to a tweet. I searched WordPress. Nothing. I tried Google. Nothing. I looked for WordPress extensions. Nothing¹.

Finally, after hours of experimenting & searching, I found http://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds, which told me:

Starting with WordPress 2.9, it’s super easy to embed videos, images, and other content into your WordPress site.

…

The easy embedding feature is mostly powered by oEmbed, a protocol for site A (such as your blog) to ask site B (such as YouTube) for the HTML needed to embed content (such as a video) from site B.

Ahh … so it was something called oEmbed that was responsible. A bit more searching led me to How To Disable oEmbed Support in WordPress 2.9, which finally gave me my answer.

So how do you fix this? You go to Settings > Media & uncheck the box next to Auto-Embeds, which also contains this text: “When possible, embed the media content from a URL directly onto the page. For example: links to Flickr and YouTube.”

When you do that, you’re disabling auto-embeds not only from Twitter, but also from YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, blip.tv, Flickr, Viddler, Hulu, Scribd, Photobucket, SmugMug, FunnyOrDie.com, a few others, & any other site that supports oEmbed. oWell. It’s worth it. If I was publishing a “normal” site (whatever that means) that focused on typical stuff (whatever that means), leaving oEmbed would make sense. But on a site like this, with code & who knows what else, oEmbed just gets in the way.

So what have we learned from this debacle?

1. When you inform users about a new feature in your Release Notes, it would be nice if you told them how to turn the damn thing off.

2. Simple checkboxes that disable a large feature that potentially affects 20 different services should probably be labelled really clearly, with as much explanatory text as possible. Links to more details would be nice too.

3. WordPress needs to document its stuff better, so I don’t have to write posts like this.

I’m glad that’s behind me. Now, on to more productive work!