Twittering

A friend and I were fiddling around with Twitter and I decided to put my Twits in a sidebar. Twitter provides a few ‘badges’ for this but, like any good geek, I wanted a little more control.

Fortunately, Twitter also provides a RSS feed.

Textpattern Plugins to the rescue. The RSS parsing was trivial — Bit Santos’ bit_rss is dead simple to install and configure. While not as fully featured as a hand-rolled Magpie RSS feed parser, it did what I wanted and took five minutes to get up and running.

The remaining problem was that the Twitter feed prefaces each item with an @fultonchain (my username). This is kind of redundant when included on a weblog but something I have no control over. What I do have control over is what is displayed and another TXP plugin, an7_filter, made it easy for me to replace the ‘@fultonchain’ with whitespace.

Thanks to Textpattern, the total time from conception to implementation was about fifteen minutes. It doesn’t get much easier.