I wanted to make my blogs, and websites a little more interactive, and also give people another way to interact with and or contact me. I decided on creating a twitter widget to put in the sidebars of my blogs, and also add to the front page of the website. The process was surprisingly easy. Here’s what you do.
If you don’t have a twitter account you want to go to twitter.com and create an account. O.K. we’ve got our account set up, now go to https://twitter.com/settings/widgets . If you’re not logged into your account, twitter will ask for your username and password and then it should open to a page that has a box that say widgets with a radio button that says “Create New”. Click on create new, and the next page that opens will be the configuration page. Put your @twiiterUserName where it asks for it, and then configure it. If you want replies to show up in your time line then uncheck that box, click whether you want your photo’s to auto-expand or not, adjust your height, theme color, enter your link color hex code or stick with the default, and click create widget. Thats it your done, when the next page loads, cut and paste the code into your blog or website and you’ll have a cool twitter feed, posting all of your updates in real time.
I placed the twitter feed on my Tumblr blog in the sidebar. It’s a custom theme I created so, you’ll have to read the Tumblr documentation to install it in yours. For Tumblr I basically just created another side box and pasted the code into it.
On my website, I did some rewriting of my css to make it responsive to both browsers and phone screens, and using the @media code the widget will even be omitted from smaller displays so the page still displays properly in most devices.
On this wordpress blog, using the 2012 theme, I just clicked on appearance, widgets, dragged a text box over to my sidebar, and pasted the code in the text box. It really couldn’t of been any simpler with wordpress and this is one of the reasons I’m really glad I decided to give WordPress a try. Between the website, Tumblr, and this WordPress blog, WordPress was hands down the easiest to install the widget in !
If you want to get a bit crazy with this project and really customize the heck out of the timeline and make it your own, you can check out the developers page here.
This was a really, easy, fun project, and I think it’s a great way to add a little interactivity to your blog or website. Any questions, please feel free to comment, or tweet it from the side bar. Thanks for reading and good luck !
