How to Integrate Twitter onto your Blog the Easy Way
Alongside Twitter’s massive rise in popularity over the past two years, I’ve noticed that a lot of WordPress themes are coming with built-integration between your blog and your Twitter account. Typically, you enter your account name in a theme options page, and then your blog will display your latest tweets and maybe include a “follow me” link.
Guess what? These features can be nice, but they’re almost totally unnecessary. You already had the ability to do this, and probably more flexibly than the theme’s particular function allows.
How to Display Your Latest Tweets on your Blog
Go to your Twitter feed. At the bottom of the sidebar, there should be a link for your account’s RSS feed. Click on it, then copy the URL.
Head over to your WordPress dashboard. Go to Appearance → Widgets, and add an RSS widget to the sidebar (or whatever widget area you like). Under “Enter the RSS feed URL here,” paste in the URL of your Twitter account’s RSS feed.
Voila. Done. And with the built-in functions of the widget, you can control how many of your recent tweets appear, and you can choose whether to display the date of the tweets or not.
How to Add a “Follow Me” Link
First, a minor concession: if you want a pretty Twitter icon that links to your Twitter feed, you’ll probably want to go with a theme that provides it. But if you don’t care, you can add a link a bunch of ways:
- Add your Twitter feed as a bookmark under Links → Add New. The link will then appear wherever you place the “bookmarks” widget.
- Install the Plugin “Page Links To” by Mark Jaquith. This allows you to redirect any Page you create to any URL you wish. So create a Page called “Follow Me!”, use the Plugin to redirect it to your Twitter feed, and then watch as the link appears in your page menu. (Note: WordPress 3.0 is going to totally revamp the menu system in order to make this sort of thing a whole lot easier.)
- Just go into the theme templates and add a link yourself. If you’re familiar with HTML, it’s not rocket science.
Nice post on Twitter integration but I’ve been looking around your site and haven’t found a Twitter link for you. Are you not using Twitter?
Also, I like your design and look forward to future good work from you.