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.

WordPress always comes with the default theme, so the first thing I did was getting a nicer wordpress theme. A wordpress theme is like a template and it gives shape to the looks and feels of your WordPress site.

Where to get WordPress Themes?
There are many excellent themes out there and many are completely free. Some theme builders sell their themes. Themes that are for sale are called "premium themes". You can download some of the best free and/or premium WordPress Themes at these places:

• Top WP Themes (Free)
• 100 Excellent WordPress Themes (Free)
• Woo Themes (Free and Premium)
• iThemes (Premium)
• Revolution Two (Premium)

How to install a theme?
To install a theme, unzip the one you downloaded and upload the complete folder to your wordpress themes directory. You have access to that directory via FTP under: your domain » wp-content » themes

Now log in to your wordpress admin area (dashboard), click on "Appearance" and click on the theme you want to preview. To install your selected theme, click "activate" (upper right corner).

Voila!

P.S. Did you know you can earn some good cash with premium themes? Watch the upcoming posts!