Like many others, I was surprised and disappointed back in December when Storify announced it was shutting down. For educators who embrace Twitter, it was used to organize class tweets into study guides, archive chats, record historical reenactments, and so much more. Not long after this announcement, the search for a replacement began, and for me, a great alternative quickly emerged: Wakelet.

A free, web-based tool, Wakelet offers many of the same capabilities that were available in Storify. Not only that, but they offered a tool that would import all of your Storify stories directly into Wakelet. I tested this tool with one of my stories and everything imported flawlessly just as they advertised. Soon thereafter, all of my stories were imported, and I became a regular user. I’ve come across other replacement tools, such as Participate, but nothing I’ve seen so far is as close to a Storify clone as Wakelet… until last week.

Usually, after I attend a conference, I compile all of my live-tweets along with those from other attendees into a collection of notes from the sessions I attended. This can be tedious, especially the organizing of these tweets – let’s face it, dragging and dropping within a long list of items in a Web 2.0 interface has never exactly been lightning fast. As I was going through this process for a conference I had attended and presented at the week before, I inadvertently came across this post from Alan Levine’s blog: Storify Bites the Dust. If You Have WordPress, You Don’t Need Another Third Party Clown Service. It’s a lengthy rant, but he makes a very good point: why sign up for a similar service that will likely meet the same ending? WordPress pretty much does everything you need to build your own social media-based story.

And he’s exactly right.

Take a look at this Wakelet story I had created for the USciences 3.0 eLearning Conference. Now take a look at the same story in WordPress. Notice much of a difference? The cards generated by Twitter and other social media platforms are the same no matter what tool you use, and WordPress makes it dead simple to place these cards wherever you want.

All you have to do is paste the URL of a tweet into a WordPress page or blog post, and it automatically converts the tweet to a card. So when I paste in this:

https://twitter.com/marcdrumm/status/973546217102753793

WordPress automatically converts that to this:

Same with Instagram – this:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BasccZagOg4/

becomes this:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Marc Drumm (@marcdrumm)

YouTube too – this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK1IG-A3YoU

becomes this:

…and this list goes on and on. If a particular tool or functionality isn’t available, you’ll most likely be able to add it by installing a plugin. For example, the ability to create a card for a generic web page is not something that’s built into WordPress (at least, I’m not aware of a way to do it). Fortunately, that can be added by installing a free plugin like Content Cards.

At this point, all that’s left are some cosmetic touches and arranging everything the way you’d like. Setting the Featured Image in the WordPress page/post usually places your introductory image at the beginning of the page. Plus, rearranging cards is quick and easy: simply switch from the Visual to Text editor, cut the URLs you want to move, paste them where you want them to go, then switch back to Visual.

Realistically, I realize that WordPress is not the answer for everyone. There are those who won’t want to invest the time in learning it or feel that it may be overkill for what they’re trying to accomplish, and to those people, I still highly recommend Wakelet. That being said, learning WordPress is great skill to have these days – it now powers 30% of all web sites, and it’s hard to match its versatility.