Stalk Me Using Twitter
The past few days I’ve been debating on the best way to have a mini-feed in the sidebar of my blog. Really, I’ve been looking for a way to better let you guys keep track of what I’m doing, interesting things I’ve found, and things like that. Well, I’ve finally come up with a plan! I signed up for a Twitter account today. I’ve never used Twitter before. Actually, I’ve been pretty skeptical about it’s value in the past. But after looking at some of the alternatives, it seems like an easy way up have a short area in the sidebar that I can use to post short snippets. You can see my updates in the sidebar under “What I’m Doing”.
The process of adding the Twitter feed was very easy, but if you’ve been wondering how to get your Twitter account on your Wordpress blog, here’s a very easy way.
First, sign up for your Twitter account here.
Second, download Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin. Install this plugin as usual. This plugin is Widget ready, meaning you can simply add it as a normal widget to your sidebar. If you’ve got a custom theme or a theme that isn’t widget ready (like mine), simply add
<?php aktt_sidebar_tweets(); ?>
where you want your Twitter feed to appear in your blog’s theme. Alex’s plugin lets you update your Twitter account from your own blog, turn your Twitter updates into blog posts, and my favorite, have a blog post automatically created that summarizes that day’s Twitter updates.
That’s really all you need to get your Twitter feed up and running on your Wordpress blog. I was able to come across ceTwit, a nice app that lets you update your Twitter account from your Windows Mobile or smartphone. It uses your phones WiFi access instead of the text messaging. This is nice for me because each text costs me 15 cents. Yup, I can now update my Twitter account while sittin’ on the john. You can download ceTwit here.
So that’s all I did to get my Twitter account up and running on Simply-Basic.com. I’m going to try it out for a few weeks and see if I update it enough to be worth while.
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This article was written by John Kolbert on January 16, 2008 and filed as Announcements, Tutorial/How-To. Get the latest articles by subscribing to the RSS feed. This article, including images and attachments, is property of John Kolbert and is not to be republished or translated without prior written permission.
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