If you are one of the millions of people active on Twitter then there is also a good chance that you may be creating content elsewhere on the interweb and committing your thoughts more fully to the blogosphere. If that is the case then you ought to consider using one of the many widgets available that enable your tweets to appear on your blog (or website for that matter). Not only is this aesthetically pleasing and gets readers involved in your tweets, it also helps strengthen your personal social media ecosystem – by this, I mean using one platform on which you are active to sign post traffic to another. So there you have it – this post was borne out of necessity to highlight some of the tools available that allow you to make your tweets show up on your blog. I hope this post highlights a few widgets from the basic, up to the more sophisticated.
Twitter allows you to embed your tweets fairly easily by copying and pasting some HTML into your blog. If you’re just starting out in the blogging game, I would recommend you use this widget as it creates the code in a matter of seconds. Whilst, the Twitter option is functional, easy to use and offers some personalisation, it is perhaps less visually pleasing than its cooler rivals. However, simplicity is not necessarily a bad thing and for someone with an urge to create content, rather than get bogged down in the intricacies of code, you could do a lot worse than using the standardised Twitter widget. To get this quick bit of code, simply visit the Twitter Goodies site and choose from a profile widget, search widget, faves widget or list widget.
TwitStamp
TwitStamp is very much in the same vein as the standard Twitter widget in that it speedily offers you a choice of funky badges that displays your latest tweets. This app scores higher when it comes to personalisation in comparison to the Twitter widget, whilst retaining its user friendly feel. There are some other great features that let you play around with the badge’s size and background, as well as a handy TwitCard feature you should check out that incorporates your name, avatar, bio, latest tweet and number of followers.
Language is a Virus
This writing prompt (and somewhat unusually named) website offers hundreds of widgets that you can select by size, colour and style. If you are looking for something unusual that other people (probably) won’t have, then this site should be your first port of call. Whilst, there are many, many widgets which are not to my taste, the sheer breadth of designs is worthy of your attention. The main problem will be choosing just one. Again this site guides you through an easy step-by-step process and gives you some code at the end.
Tweetizen
Tweetizen is a slightly more complex widget as it incorporates tweets from particular groups. This is ideal for blogs with several authors or companies who have their employees tweeting for them. It’s fairly straightforward and produces a piece of embed code that you can add anywhere on your blog or website. In addition, you can even customize the look and feel of it by adding an extra stylesheet to override the default CSS stylings.
Tweet
In common with a lot of Twitter tools and apps, the best ones are often created by small teams of developers elsewhere. The beauty of opening up your API is that the crowd can take it on, change it and ultimately make it better. Tweet is another fine example of just that. This unobtrusive piece of JavaScript code enables you to do lots of things, way above and beyond just embedding your latest tweets. For instance, you can display tweets from a particular Twitter search, incorporate tweets from other accounts, as well as the automatic linking of #hashtags. Whilst, this code enables you to do all sorts of creative things, a decent understanding of coding basics is required.
