I need a better Twitter badge!

May 7, 2009 11:25 AM

I want to display a Twitter badge on one of my sites, but the official badge from Twitter is terribly slow, and it shows my replies when I'd rather it didn't. Is there a better badge to use?

I'd make one myself if I knew how, but my skills fall in the CSS and HTML side, not anything programmy. Basically, I need something I can integrate into my site template to look exactly how I want that only shows my latest tweet and not my replies... one which doesn't slow down the entire page load time. Any suggestions?

posted by katillathehun to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: You'll want to load the twitter updates via an AJAX request. The page loads, and the widget would then do the work of loading your tweets. That way, if Twitter chokes, your whole page isn't stuck waiting for the widget to update. You basically want to do something like this. I'm almost 100% sure someones already made a better twitter badge, based on this idea, but I can't recall where I saw it.
posted by chunking express at 11:51 AM on May 7, 2009

what CMS is used for your site? if you're using wordpress, the Twitter Tools plugin by Alex King has a widget that will do what you want.
posted by jrishel at 11:53 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: chunking express - Thank you! That's what I needed. I'll have to do some poking around to figure out how to hide @replies (though that isn't essential) and some other minor details, but it loads quickly and doesn't kill my page in the process.
posted by katillathehun at 1:40 PM on May 7, 2009

If you're using Drupal (or someone else comes along who is) there's a Twitter plugin that pulls in your updates, caches them locally, and displays them in a sidebar without the lag of hitting Twitter.com directly each time your site loads.

It also has some nice bits like posting to Twitter when you write a new blog entry, hiding @replies and other filtering, etc.
posted by verb at 7:44 PM on May 7, 2009

You can filter them out from the JSON you get back from Twitter. I don't think there is a way to request your messages minus the @replies from twitter directly.
posted by chunking express at 10:19 AM on May 8, 2009