Twitter 111: Twitter Badge on WordPress.com – Showing Tweets

In response to this post about how you can put a “Follow Me” Twitter badge on your WordPress.com blog, budgallant says:

that’s interesting, but definitely not at alternative to actually displaying the twitter updates…. what is up with wordpress? do they have a bias against twitter?

It’s not an anti-Twitter thing; it’s about WordPress.com stripping any javascript that you attempt to paste into one of its widgets. They say it’s a security measure, and I’ll take them at their word. I suppose if you have several million blogs on one server domain, you don’t want one with malicious code to bring the whole platform down. So the easy way out is to not allow anything but straight HTML in sidebar widgets.

Thankfully, there is a way around the problem, that lets you both have a badge people can click to follow you, and also display your latest Tweets.

You do the first part by following the instructions I had in the previous post.

Putting the latest Tweets in is actually easier, because Twitter provides an RSS feed that you can pull into an RSS widget in WordPress.com.

So you start by going to your Twitter home page, and at the bottom left you will see a link that says “RSS” that looks like this:

Ctrl-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) on that RSS link, and depending on your browser you will select one of the following:

Then you go to your WordPress.com dashboard, and under Appearance, click on Widgets:

You will want to click the Add link next to the RSS widget type.

Then click the Edit link on the RSS Widget as it appears on the right side of your dashboard:

And fill out the widget details as below, pasting the URL you had copied from your Twitter page into the top line:

Click “Done” and then “Save Changes”

And your sidebar will look something like what you see in mine, which as of this moment is:

While doing this post, I took advantage of the opportunity to increase the number of tweets displayed to six, instead of the three I had previously.

I hope you’ve found these instructions helpful as you incorporate your Twitter stream into your WordPress.com blog. It’s a little more complicated than just copying the widget from Twitter, but I think it accomplishes the same thing.