Let’s face it, the Twitter search sucks and you’ll be lucky to find tweets over a week old with it even though they still exist.

Twitter has been plagued with service issues and the fail whale (which someone coded in pure CSS) is a regular occurrence once again.

I came across a tutorial the other day on how to create a browsable, searchable archive of tweets which you can use to host your own tweets. And the best part is? It’s powered by WordPress.

In this article, I’ll go over my experience with how I set up my own @themelab tweet archive powered by WordPress, including:

• Backing up my tweets with a third-party service
• Importing those older tweets into WordPress
• Setting it up so new tweets get imported automatically
• Installing the theme to display them nicely

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If you’re not familiar with the WP-PageNavi WordPress plugin, it allows you to replace normal previous/next navigation with a more advanced, numbered paging navigation. This is a feature I’ve included on a number themes I’ve developed, including RS16, Blogwave, RS17, and Bright Spot.

In this tutorial, I’m going to go over how to:

• Install WP-PageNavi and properly integrate it in your theme.
• Two methods to disable and/or override default plugin styles.
• An overview of the HTML markup output by WP-PageNavi
• Finally, how to alter the look of your page navigation through CSS

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Last weekend I released a free Thematic child theme called Astatic. It was probably the most “advanced” Thematic theme I’ve ever made as I made use of several theme filters, as well as CSS styling to make certain pages look differently using the same HTML markup.

In this tutorial, I’ll go over:

• The very basics of making a child theme
• How to use Thematic action and filter hooks
• How to style pages differently with CSS without changing markup

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