Twitter Badge Widget For Wordpress

What is a twitter badge and how to install it on your wordpress blog. Well, have a look at my wordpress sidebar and you get the idea. It's a cool twitter gadget and it displays your latest twitter updates on your website.

Important! (update feb 1 2009)
You need a self hosted wordpress blog for this. If you don't, there's another way to display your tweets on your wordpress.com blog (no badge though).

How to Install the Twitter Badge...
When you go to the official twitter badge download page, you will see that there isn't a "twitter badge for wordpress" option, so wordpress users are stuck with the "other" option.

When you click on that option, you need to decide which version you would like to install on your wordpress blog. (I picked the flash version.)

Click "continue"... Then pick either the interactive widget (the one I am using on my website right now) or the display-only widget. Click "continue" again, select a color style (smooth, velvetica or revo) and a widget size (narrow, wide or full). I chose smooth and narrow.

Copy the produced html code.

Now go to your wordpress dashboard, find "Appearance" and click on "Widgets".

Please note that your wordpress theme must be widget-ready. If it isn't, consider to switch to a widgetable theme. You can find some nice wordpress themes at woothemes.

Select "show all widgets", scroll down below, find "Text" and click on "Add". A Text widget appears to your right... Open it (click on edit) and paste the copied twitter code in there.

Now before you click "Done", inspect the code because you MUST adjust the twitter code manually to adjust the width of the twitter badge...

Now pay attention!
In that code you will find width="290"... not once but twice. Change both values to the desireable width (you can do the same thing with the height-values of course).

Now, click "Done", position the Text-widget where you wanna have it (I put mine on top) and click "Save Changes".

Reload your wordpress powered webpage and ... Voila. There it is. Your Twitter flash badge for wordpress.

Now the only thing I don't like about the twitter badge is that it leaves an empty hole while it is loading. This can take up to a few seconds. For this reasons, I added a background to the widget. In case you wanna know how to add a background to your flashy twitter badge for wordpress, let me know.

Also, in case you're worried about the W3C validation of your wordpress code (XHTML strict flags the embed method), there's a good workaround for that as well.

Talk to you later.

How To Install WordPress

Installing Wordpress is very easy via your Control Panel or Cpanel. That's the login page you get from your hosting provider to manage your main domain. Usually you get in there by going straight to www.domain.tld/cpanel (change "domain.tld" with your main domain).

If you don't have a hosting provider yet, I recommend the baby croc web hosting package from Host Gator. That package allows you to install an unlimited amount of domains (and blogs, and websites, and ... ) on one hosting account which is great!
Hostgator offers great support and service too! Now, let's move on with the wordpress installation...

How to install WordPress
For those who have a hostgator account, log in to your control panel and scroll down to Software and Services. There you'll find the Fantastico De Luxe icon. Clicking on that icon brings up a new window. On the left hand side of that window, you'll find a menu. In that menu, find blogs, click "WordPress", then click on "new installation". Select your domain and follow the instructions to install WordPress.

That's it! You're ready to publish your posts and pages.

In the very near future, I will show you how to make some good money with your wordpress blog.