Twitter, RSS and Wordpress

I’ll start this off with a bit of an explanation of what RSS is. It stands for Really Simple Syndication and its the best thing since sliced bread. If your not using it your actually driving away readers. Put it this way. How many sites do you visit on a daily basis? You want to read all of your friends entries, but your not going to go to each and every page all the time are you!? Not if you’ve got as many feeds as I do! With RSS you go to one page, bloglines or if you already have a gmail account (and who doesn’t!) you can go to google.com/reader and start adding feeds. To get you started my feed URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Eruanna (I use feed burner so I can manage my statistics.) The main advantage is that if you read those tween sites that use an awfully small font then you can actually read the posts in the feed reader.

If your using a hosted blog service like blogger, wordpress.com etc then you already have an RSS feed. There should be a link to it on your site, if your using wordpress then your feed is yoururl.com/feed

So firstly, if you’re not using twitter then your missing out on something theoretically pointless but really really addictive. So if you’ll look at my sidebar <– which I have my twitter feeding into.

Heres how I imported my twitter into my sidebar. (Alex Kings just released a flickr plugin
Download and install the FeedList Plugin. I tried to write my own but I gave up! Then activate it and in your sidebar.php page write the following:

<ul class="twitterFeed">
<?php feedList(array("rss_feed_url"=>"RSSURLHERE", "num_items"=>5, "show_description"=>false,"before"=>"<li>", "after"=>"</li>", "random"=>false,"sort"=>"none","suppress_link"=>true,"show_date"=>true));?>
</ul>

Add your RSS url into the specified space. and tada you’ve imported your twitter feed to your wordpress blog. There are many variables you can change but these are the ones I used.


DateMarch 23, 2007     CategoryPosted in Blogging, Wordpress     Comment    


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13 Comments Add yours?

CommentLisa
CommentFri, 3.23.07
Comment7:47 pm

RSS sounds cool, I haven’t tried it yet though, maybe I should.. :) I didn’t understand what twitter is though.. what exactly does that do?




CommentRhys
CommentFri, 3.23.07
Comment11:09 pm

I have to admit, if I never’d met you, I would’ve never had used RSS feeds.

Whilst I can’t see the point of twitter, I love google reader. Guys, check it out. She speaks sense!




CommentNan
CommentSat, 3.24.07
Comment12:00 am

If you don’t have RSS and we have no relation such as comments or link exchange I will most likely never return to your blog - I use a built in RSS feature with FireFox and I am utterly hooked :)




Commenthan
CommentSat, 3.24.07
Comment1:48 pm

Lisa - Twitter lets you tell people what your doing at any one time. and yeah, you should use RSS!

Rhys - I always thought you did use RSS befr eyou told me you didnt!

Nan - Thats a good point - urls are so unmemorable! I prefer webbased ones so I can get to them whatever computer I’m on.




Commenthan
CommentSun, 3.25.07
Comment2:20 pm

tralalal




Commentcornflakeguy
CommentTue, 4.24.07
Comment6:18 am

This is great. I tried it today, and it works great. EXCEPT! It doesn’t refresh! Since I have added it I have twittered several times, and refreshed my blog in Firefox several times in the last 10-15 min. and its just not refreshing. What am I missing?

thanks!




Commenthan
CommentTue, 4.24.07
Comment12:09 pm

A better way to do this guys is here:
http://www.twitter.com/t/status/user_timeline/26613?callback=twitterCallback&count=10

Mine was just an experiment! This one works better! ^^




CommentBobbi-lee
CommentTue, 8.7.07
Comment9:50 am

I’ve been looking for a tutorial about implimenting twitter into wordpress like this but couldn’t find one. Thankyou so much for this tutorial. I have a question though, how do I make the updates in the sidebar like their own blog entry (like if you click on the # it stays in your blog) mine doesnt have any link. Sorry if that’s confusing.




Commenthan
CommentTue, 8.7.07
Comment11:32 am

Your talking about on my sidebar? thats a different plugin managed through wordpress called sideblog.




CommentBrenda
CommentTue, 11.6.07
Comment4:38 am

I got this error
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: feedlist() in /home/insanity/public_html/wp-content/themes/eruannatutorial/sidebar.php on line 74

And yes I activated the plugin

This is what I added to my sidebar

Twitter

“http://twitter.com/Insanity_Kills”, “num_items”=>5, “show_description”=>false,”before”=>”", “after”=>”",

“random”=>false,”sort”=>”none”,”suppress_link”=>true,”show_date”=>true));?>

NOW I realize
‘http://twitter.com/Insanity_Kills’ probably wouldn’t work
so I tried
http://twitter.com/Insanity_Kills/statuses/391237362

I’m still not sure which link it is. I got the 2nd link by clicking RSS.

Uh I feel so stupid :angry:




Commenthan
CommentTue, 11.6.07
Comment10:46 am

Its the second link. the one you get through RSS cos its importing the RSS feed, but if you read the comments theres a better solution there :)




CommentBrenda
CommentTue, 11.6.07
Comment1:12 pm

http://twitter.com/t/status/user_timeline/26613?callback=twitterCallback&count=10

Page doesn’t exsist




CommentSebastiano
CommentSun, 11.25.07
Comment4:08 am

errm , it’s a little outdated but you should try

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/USERNAME.rss
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