About Derek Fernholz

Derek Fernholz is a tech minded, idea having, gadget collecting web developer and software engineer ever thinking about the future of things and trying to stay a step ahead of the curve. This is his home on the web, you can find out more all around, or more specifically here

Sep 19, 2008

TweetFeed Plugin Released

This post was written by derek on September 19th, 2008. Filed under Plugin, TweetFeed, coding, featured, introducing

I’m going to keep this one short and sweet. I spent a little bit of time (when I wasn’t working) over the last week and turned that little script I mentioned in the last post into a full blown wordpress plugin with a working settings page and everything! This is my first plugin, but I did test it quite a bit. Obviously, if you run into any issues in using it, do not hesitate to contact me by leaving a comment on this post.

This plugin consists of 4 configurable options settings:

Set you cache time, if you do not set one, it will default to 1 minute. 1 minute is the smallest value that this will accept. This is to make sure that you do not exceed the 100 requests per hour limit on Twitter’s API and it makes things simpler on the backend.
Make links clickable. This option will turn any text that starts with http:// into an actual html link, otherwise it would just come through as plain text.
Make usernames clickable. This option takes any string that starts with the ‘@’ symbol and is longer than 1 character, and turns it into a link to that user’s twitter profile page (ie @theunlivedlife becomes http://twitter.com/theunlivedlife).
Display @ replies. This option is one I was really attimate about getting implemented. I don’t think that people coming to my blog need to know who I’m saying what to, I want them to see what I’m doing (the question twitter aims to answer). Other’s may say that they want a feed of what is the most current from their twitter feed and that’s an option too.

Where can you get it?

I am hosting this plugin on my server for the time being until I test out the waters on how desirable it is. So if you want to get your hands on it for your own use, go here.

I got it, now what?

Extract the file.
Upload the TweetFeed folder to your Wordpress Plugins directory.
Go to your plugins section in your Wordpress Dashboard and Activate TweetFeed
Now go to the settings area and click on the TweetFeed link.
Enter in your Twitter username and configure your options to suit you and click Update Options.
Now the only ‘code’ related thing you have to do. Simply put, <?php do_action(’get_twitter_message’); ?> wherever you want your tweets to be displayed. Done!

Since this is just pulling in the text (and optionally links) you can easily put this in a <div> or <p> element and style it to suit your needs in CSS.

I can’t wait to see what you guys do with this. What other options could you see being useful for something like this? What plugins do you think are missing currently or could be done better or differently?