Create a Twitter box in your sidebar

UPDATE July 2011
Twitter has made some changes to their Twitter Badge functionality including removing the auto generated legacy code used in this tutorial. Fortunately they have not deactivated the actual function meaning you can copy the code in the examples below, replace my handle (mor10) with yours and you’ll get your tweets just like before.

As part of the new design for this blog I added a Twitter box in the sidebar. There are hundreds of WordPress plugins that do this for you but they are all quite involved and they bog down the blog unnecessarily. Much easier to just hard code the box into your blog yourself. It’s actually surprisingly easy to do, but the code that Twitter provides is a bit wonky (and shockingly it doesn’t validate!).

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to easily create a fancy box that displays your latest Twitter rants in your sidebar without having to turn to clunky plug-ins that bog your blog down.

Get your Twitter Badge

To start off with you need your Twitter Badge. This is the official Twitter JavaScript that passes your latest tweets to wherever you want. You can get your badge at twitter.com/badges. Twitter has custom badges for MySpace, Blogger, Facebook and TypePad but surprisingly nothing for WordPress. That doesn’t really matter because it’s actually easier to just make one of your own.

Select Other and you are taken to page two which presents three options:

1. Flash (Just Me) – hideous
2. Flash with Friends – even more hideous
3. HTML/JavaScript – great for people with eyes

Select the last option (HTML/JavaScript) and you are taken to page 3 where you can customize the code by defining how many tweets you want and what the Badge title should be. I chose 2 tweets and turned the title off. This provided me with the following code:
You can get your badge at twitter.com/badges. Twitter now has custom badges for your website and Facebook. The website badge is a JS-based badge that I’ll cover in a later tutorial. For this tutorial however we’ll be using the legacy code which is no longer available from the Twitter Badge page. But you can get it right here. Using the Twitter Badge legacy code your end result will look like the following code:

(This code will of course differ depending on your settings.)

Paste the code in wherever you want on your site or your blog.

Style your Badge

The Twitter Badge comes equipped with JavaScript that injects the tweets into your badge in the form of unordered list items as well as built in style elements. They are: #twitter_div (styles the badge wrap), .sidebar_title (styles the title) and #twitter_update_list (styles the unordered list).

Before you start styling, you have to fix the generated code to make it validate. Since it is the JavaScript that actually generates the list items, browsers and validators get all cranky about the code because there are no list items within the unordered list in the markup itself. Therefore you need to insert an empty list item just to please the W3C gods:

Once that’s settled you can start styling your elements. Again because of the JavaScript you have to stick with the names Twitter provides, but that shouldn’t cause any problems. For my Twitter Badge I created a background PNG much larger than what I actually needed to accommodate a future situation where I would add more than 2 tweets at a time (which you can see by clicking here). The background graphic is cut off by a matching blue bottom border. The whole style package looks like this:

#twitter_div {
	background-image: url('img/twitterBG.png');
	background-repeat: no-repeat;
	border-bottom-style: solid;
	border-bottom-width: 1px;
	border-bottom-color: #5AA5BC;
	font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	font-size: 0.9em;
	margin-top:10px;
	padding-top: 30px;
	padding-right: 5px;
	padding-left: 5px;
}

#twitter_div ul li {
	color: #0C93BA;
	border-bottom-style: solid;
	border-bottom-width: 1px;
	border-bottom-color: #A1E8F7;
}

#twitter_div ul li a {
	text-decoration: none;
	color: #DDA84E;
}

#twitter_div ul li a:hover {
	text-decoration: none;
	color: #D78E42;
}

#twitter_div p {
	text-align: right;
	padding-right: 6px;
	padding-bottom: 10px;
}

Add a link for future followers

The observant reader will notice that there’s still one element missing: The Follow me on Twitter link in the bottom right corner. That’s the reason for the p style in the CSS code as well. So with the follow link, the final HTML markup looks like this:

	

		

	
	
Follow me on Twitter

And with that you have a fancy Twitter box you can put in your sidebar without bogging your blog down with plug-ins.

Read the second half of this tutorial, in which you learn how to hide the time stamp at the tail end of the Tweets.