Ideas for including your Twitter tweets on your site
Apr
Twitter Feed on Elitist Snob
Are you tweeting? Twitter is a social networking site that is becoming more and more popular. And so is displaying your latest ‘tweets’ on your website.
The main reason to show a few of your tweets on your website is to encourage other people to follow you on Twitter (and get all your tweets).
Tweets are often displayed in sidebars. They can also find creative homes in the header section or the footer section.
I’ll be adding a Tweet section to my own sidebar after my Easter vacation. (This site is being relaunched soon!) So I’ve been looking around for inspiration on how I want to set mine up.
The blue owl in my header is definitely a reference to my Twitter addiction activities. When you see a blue bird icon on a website these days, it is normally a variation of a Twitter icon.
There are some interesting design ideas you can look at for inspiration at:
Showcase: Twitter status design
and lots of Twitter icons at a German site (but still useful to non-German-speakers):
Heaps of Twitter resources at:
20 Twitter Status Design Tutorials, Icons & WP Plugins | Noupe
and
15 Useful Twitter hacks and plugins
Here are my favorite Twitter icons, available for free from Smashing Magazine:
Free Twitter icons via Smashing Magazine
Here is a button I created using the bird:
If you look at the actual button on a live website, you’ll see it has the number of followers in that little gap before ‘followers’ in the button.
Screenshot of TwitterCounter in action
The website asks TwitterCounter for the current number of people following the website’s owner at that given moment in time, and then displays it right in that spot. You need to know what you’re doing with CSS to pull it off.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!
Update
You can see my Twitter section in my sidebar now…
My Twitter section
