I am Lee Baillie

Yes, Twitter has an HTML widget that you can paste easily into any page. But the truth is that this widget is a little clunky and adds code to your page that can be a pain to style.

If you have a Wordpress blog, the whole process just got a little simpler with the wonderful hack displayed below. Simply replace *YOUR-TWITTER-USERNAME* with, you guessed it, your Twitter username and you’re done!

You can play around with it and add a prefix and a suffix where required. For example, you might wish to place a ‘follow me on Twitter’ link at the end of your tweet.

A perfect example of its use can be seen at the top of this page. I’m using it myself.* And you don’t need to worry about @somebody links — they show up too.

Simply paste the PHP below where you want your tweets to appear and you’ll be up and running in no time. No clunky external JavaScripts or Wordpress widgets.

<?php

$username = "*YOUR-TWITTER-USERNAME*";

// PREFIX - Place anything you want to appear BEFORE your tweet here
// WARNING: You can use HTML but remember to backslash any quotation marks (e.g. style=\"background:#FFF;\")
$prefix = "<h3>I tweet about...</h3>";

// SUFFIX - Place anything you want to appear AFTER your tweet here
// WARNING: Same as for PREFIX
$suffix = "<br /> <a href=\"http://twitter.com/*YOUR-TWITTER-USERNAME*\">follow me on Twitter</a>";

$feed = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=1";

function parse_feed($feed) {
    $stepOne = explode("<content type=\"html\">", $feed);
    $stepTwo = explode("</content>", $stepOne[1]);
    $tweet = $stepTwo[0];
    $tweet = str_replace("&lt;", "<", $tweet);
    $tweet = str_replace("&gt;", ">", $tweet);
    return $tweet;
}

$twitterFeed = file_get_contents($feed);
echo stripslashes($prefix) . parse_feed($twitterFeed) . stripslashes($suffix);
?>

Happy blogging/tweeting.

* I was using this piece of code but I’ve since re-designed my site. I needed slightly more functionality and this little snippet just didn’t quite cut it so I’ve had to revert back to Twitter’s own HTML widget.