Did you know that you can read Twitter statuses tagged with hashtags directly on Google? That is if you're using the Chrome web browser.

Search for the words 'Twitter' and any valid hashtag and you will be presented with a scrollable html div which displays the latest tweets with this hashtag. It doesn't seem to update in real-time though.

I want a Twitter badge that lists my friends tweets. It doesn't really matter if it's flash or Javascript/HTML. But I need it not as a plugin for Wordpress or Blogger but to put on any site or blog. Wohill is self-developed with PHP and Javascript, so that's why.

Either this or if there is some way to put two badges on the same site that are connected to two different Twitter accounts. For some reason this has not worked earlier.

The reason for this is that I have been putting quite some effort in trying to add mine and Randolphs tweets as badges. But it always ends up with some not-so-good solution with iframe's or something similar.

I have been looking around for a badge listing my friends tweets and I first found 2 examples but one didn't work and the other were to time consuming to get going with.

Do anyone have a tip here for a nice badge to put on our blog for either of the two purposes?
Any hints would be appreciated.

A pretty new service on the web that's called TweetStats creates stats for your Twitter profile as several different graphs and also a cloud for your most used words.

Here is an example of a graph.

And the cloud for my profile.


You can also look at general trends as graphs and clouds, i.e. what's currently being twittered about by all users.

Cool service! Keep up the good work!

Since our blog here on Wohill is not a Wordpress or Blogger blog or something similar but instead our self-developed and designed one - we have had to create all these little nice to have things ourselves that otherwise would have been offered as a plugin just to install or marked as a chosen setting. I see this mainly as fun to work with though.

One thing that I have missed for some time now is a way to automatically set a twitter status message whenever a blog post gets published. Since we are two or sometimes three writers I also need a way to check who the author is in order to set the status message on the right Twitter profile.

I searched the oustanding PHP-library PHP Classes and found a ready to use solution - the class twitter.class.php written by Lee FIndlow.

So I downloaded the class-file and created a function based on the example file provided by Lee Findlow.

function setTwitterStatusBlogEntry($uname, $passwd, $type, $url) { $T = new twitter; $T->Username = $uname; $T->Password = $passwd; $T->Status('New ' . $type . ' entry on Wohill -> ' . $url); }

So you simply call it with your twitter username and password.
When calling this function I also make conditional checks regarding who is the author and depending on that the function gets called with different username and password.

Now you can grade your Twitter profile and get a score of your Twitter profile power.
The Twitter Grade measures the relative power of a Twitter user. It is calculated as a percentile score where it like websites is better to have followers or incoming links rather than following or having outgoing links.

The score is calculated based on:
- The number of followers you have
- The power of this network of followers
- The pace of your updates
- The completeness of your profile
- More...

Well, I could certainly do better, but also worse I guess. My grade is currently 56 and my rank is 150,694 out of a possible 475,816 with 36 followers, 44 following and 252 updates. But I don't tweet that much either to be honest.

You can also take a look at your Twitter cloud on this site.
Funny thing, giving you a pretty good hint I guess whether you should get more active or not

Here's my twitter grade:



You can follow me on http://www.twitter.com/nickwick76

Twitter has become a really big thing among Internet users and it also seems to have become a routine for many people to use every day at work and/or at home. I myself is not a heavy user but I try to post a status message at least once a day. I like to read the feed/timeline of what the people I follow do and I also find it both useful and amusing to socialize in this specific way,

The way I see it Twitter is more common in the US but it has also come to grow in Sweden and the rest of Europe the last couple of months. But in my point of view it is essentially the early adopters that do it since I don't think it has hit the large mass just yet.

Why do people do it? Well, why do we blog? A few years ago blogging became a big issue and many people started their blogs (and still do). The big hype is gone though and now Twitter is probably one of the new hypes.

Twitter is also called micro-blogging and this phenomenon is both easier to write and read than blogging so it should really get even more attention and users. I remember that my first reaction to Twitter was that I would never use it since I would not be interested in all of Twitters thousands of users opinions. That was before I learned that you can adjust who you want to follow and read. We have a desire to tell everybody what we do and we also like to socialize, I guess this is a good mix.

Here are a couple of things regarding this topic that I have been thinking about lately.

Retweeting

I have seen this for quite some time now when following timoreilly for example. He often uses this syntax:

Retweeting @someUser: The users latest tweet (again)

I have also seen the word 'Retweet' instead of 'Retweeting' but else the same syntax. I understand the idea of this and I guess it is a good one too. A user can push another user's tweets and at the same time update his own. But this isn't really a standard yet, is it? Some time ago the reply-functionality in a tweet (@useraname bla bla bla) wasn't built in but because of the heavy use of it Twitter decided to do so. I predict some similar thing will happen to this Reweeting-thing. If I have completely missed something here please enlighten me.

How do you post your tweets?

Most often I use the web either directly on Twitter or via other sites (on where you can post to other social networks as well, for example HelloTxt). I have also posted from iPhone (Twinkle). But when looking at what Twitter users in general use it is certainly a wealth of different programs and sites. Here are a few:
- Twitpress
- twhirl
- beTwittered
- TwitterFox
- TweetDeck
- twitterfeed
- TwitterBerry

And you can find more on the Twitter download page.

Reading tweets

How do you all read tweets? Do you follow the timelines directly on the Twitter website or in some other way? Twitter offers different widgets to publish your own or other's tweets on a blog or site for example.

And one last thing. I have built our own twitter aggregator with some help from different sites (see the Twitter category on Wohill for more info and of course the aggregated tweets on the blog itself). I made it work for several browsers which means I checked it strictly for FF and IE (both 7 and 6). However we experience occasional and sporadic problems on Macintosh on different browsers. And another thing is that when I start a new tweet with the referral keyword (@user) it will show nicely on the public timline but not in the aggregated tweets, that is the entire tweet becomes invisible.

My twitter username, by the way, is @nickwick76 if you would like to follow me!

This blog entry is about a Twitter project which is kind of cool called inwotr.com (INWOTR is a shortening for INternet WOrld TRaveller). inwotr.com is created by a person who wants to travel the world using the Internet. He/she writes:

"My first goal is to locate and follow one Twitter user from every country and later on, expand it to every city. I’m going to explain the reasoning behind using Twitter later on. I’m not sure how or if this journey is going be possible but if I can accomplish my goal, I’ll share it with everyone on here. After Twitter, I’m going to try to adapt and expand this journey to other social networking sites."

So he has started to add Twitter users to the travel map of his. I was notified and filled in a form as a request to be the representative in Sweden which I now also have become.Take a look at the map and route and you'll notice me in Sweden. By the way, we can see yet another place where the API of Google Maps has become useful.

It feels kind of abstract though and one wonders how the travel actually will take place. Nevertheless I think it is interesting and have a feeling that things will become more clear later on.

As you might have noticed if you are visiting this site now and then, we are using Twitter quite a lot on Wohill. Currently it is me, randolph and our honored guest twitterer Haddoc who are contributing. Thank's a lot for making this site a bit more alive Haddoc!

You are also more than welcome to join us if you would like to. Have a look at the right sidebar for more information and send us a mail. Of course you will need an account on Twitter first. If you are new to the twitter concept I have written some posts already but the short version is that Twitter is a service where you can post updates or small messages to. People can follow each others updates and messages for different users can be aggregated into other sites (like on Wohill).

Follow me if you are interested and I will follow you back. I am quite sure Randolph and Haddoc feels the same way

In one of my former posts 'Microblogging with Twitter' I ended the post with the statement that it didn't work in Internet explorer. So true, but I have a workaround for this now which make multiple user tweets display the same way no matter which browser is used.

Use the same approach described in the former post for Firefox, Safari etc. For Internet Explorer the solution is to use iframes. Since there seems to be a problem displaying several user tweets in the same window instead we will display several windows, where each one contains tweets for only one user,

Create an html-file (referred to as 'tweetsNW.html' below) for each user which have the following syntax:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style.css" /> <a href="http://twitter.com/nickwick76" title="Follow Nic on Twitter" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.wohill.com/images/wo_nick.jpg" style="margin:3px 0 0 0" /></a> <div id="twitterNW" align="left" style="margin:0 0 0 15px"> <p>Please wait while my tweets load <br /><img src="http://www.wohill.com/images/wo_ajax_loader.gif" /></p> <p><a href="http://twitter.com/nickwick76" target="_blank">If you can't wait - check out what I've been twittering</a></p> </div> <script src="http://www.wohill.com/js/twitter.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script> <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"> <!-- Get twitters --> getTwitters('twitterNW', { id: 5549092, count: 2, enableLinks: true, ignoreReplies: true, prefix: '<span style=\"color:#0000FF\">Nic said </span>', clearContents: true }); </script>

In the file where you want to display the tweets, use conditional statements for html to decide which code to run depending on if the browser is IE or not.

For Internet Explorer use:

<!--[If IE]> HTML CODE TO RUN <![endif]-->

For non-Internet Explorer use:

<!--[if !IE]>--> HTML CODE TO RUN (i.e. the code we used in the former post) <!--<![endif]-->

So if the browser is Internet Explorer use a script block like this for each user:

<script type=\"text/javascript\"> <!-- who = \"NW\" inwidth = 180; //--> </script> <script src=\"http://www.wohill.com/js/tweetsplugin.js\" type=\"text/javascript\"> </script>

What happens here is that two variables are set; 'who' and 'inwidth'. The 'who'-variable is specific to the user which we can see in the js plugin-file below. The variable 'inwidth' specifies the width of the iframe, which will be rendered by the script below. Depending on the value of the 'who'-variable different source files are set for the iframe and also different iframe id's:

function show_presence() { if (who == "RG") { var iframeId = "myframe1"; var tlink = " src=\"http://www.wohill.com/include/tweetsRG.html\""; } if (who == "NW") { var iframeId = "myframe2"; var tlink = " src=\"http://www.wohill.com/include/tweetsNW.html\""; } document.write("<ifr" + "ame" + " id=\"" + iframeId + "\"" + " name=\"tweetsIframe\"" + " width=\"" + inwidth + "\"" + " frameborder=\"0\"" + tlink + " marginwidth=\"1\"" + " marginheight=\"0\"" + " vspace=\"0\"" + " hspace=\"0\"" + " allowtransparency=\"true\"" + " scrolling=\"no\"" + " style=\"overflow:visible; display:none\">"); document.write("</ifr" + "ame>"); } show_presence();

So this is what we need to make it look the same way no matter what browser you use. One thing you might think of if you implement this is that, even though you haven't specified a height for the iframe there is still some overflow. There is a way to get passed this and to get dynamic iframe height as well. Just include some JavaScript code in the header of the main file and you're done. Have a look at this page, where I found it, for further instructions.

As I mentioned in my latest post 'Microblogging with Twitter' we have added tweets to this blog and the two latest are always displayed on the right-hand side of the site, for me and Randolph.



If you look more closely you might notice that there is a new block below these twitter blocks called 'Guest Tweets by...'. This is a new functionality we thought might be fun and interesting. Anyone with a Twitter account can send us a mail with there Twitter nickname and we will add it to the database. Each time the site is reloaded two tweets will be displayed for a random user stored in the database.

The only thing we really need is your Twitter nickname, but you would save me some research if you could hand me some more information as well. I know, I could build some cool functions that looks up what I want based on a nickname but I will have to do that some other day. Let me know if you have such that I can use.

What we need is specified in the prepared mail that will open in your preferred mail client if you click on the mail icon next to "Do you want guest tweets on Wohill". (or this one)

Please join us, we might think of other fun stuff to do later on since Twitter has an interesting and evolving API and lots of talented users are doing cool stuff with it.

To accomplish this guest twitter functionlity I used the functionality specified in the earlier post and added a new function which gets data from the database (a random row), creates an array and returns it. This function is called from the same page as the div blocks are located. The id-specific values of the 'getTwitters'-function and the div-block are populated with the values from the returned array of the function below. Everytime Wohill is reloaded a new random users tweets will be displayed.

Here is the function (php):

function getRandomTwitterUserInfo() { /* Local login variables */ $mysql_username = 'username'; $mysql_password = 'password'; $mysql_host = 'host'; $mysql_database = 'db'; $twitter_table = "twitterUserInfo"; /* Create a connection and set current active database */ $link = mysql_connect($mysql_host, $mysql_username, $mysql_password) or die('Could not connect to database: ' . mysql_error()); mysql_select_db($mysql_database, $link) or die('Could not set database'); $select_query = sprintf("SELECT * FROM %s", $twitter_table); $select_result = mysql_query($select_query); /* Check result */ if (!$select_result) { $message = 'Invalid query: ' . mysql_error() . '\n'; $message .= 'Whole query: ' . $select_query; die($message); } $random_row = rand(1, mysql_num_rows($select_result)); mysql_data_seek($select_result, $random_row); $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($select_result); $twitterUserInfo = array($row['twitterId'], $row['twitterNickname'], $row['twitterImageUrl']); return $twitterUserInfo; }

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates to the Twitter website in different ways. These updates (short messages) can be displayed in other places too, like a blog. One could question if this is useful or satisfying in any way, but I believe that the way we use it here is kind of neat.

We already have a blog but it takes time to create blog posts. For me it depends on the type of blog post I write. It can take hours or it can take 5 minutes. Randolph spends a whole lot of time on his. You should only know how much time and devotion he puts into his creations. With Twitter you can make the blog/site more alive. It is like Facebook, you write a status of what you're doing or how you feel or something like that. Something always happens on the site which is more fun.

So what you need to do first is to register at Twitter (unless you want to display someone elses tweets). And then it is just to add a little script. This can be done in a very easy way or a little bit more complicated.

1. Use the predefined badges that Twitter provides. Just choose an option and paste the script code to where you want your Twitter to be visible. You can tune settings like how many tweets you want to show.

2. Use customized badges which can be modified more by you. And another good reason for this is that the one we use will not hang the site if Twitter performs bad, since it will load as the last element of the blog.

Remy Sharp explains and provides code and instructions on how to do this.
We have customized it just a bit to fit our site better.

Add a div-element in where the tweets will be displayed. We will use two div-elements, one for me and one for Randolph. Randolph has created images which are used to more clearly indicate who says something:

<div align="left" style="margin: 0 0 0 20px"> <h3 style="color:#E1771E;margin:0 0 0 4px;padding: 0 0 0 0">Latest tweets:</h3> <a href="http://twitter.com/randolphguy" title="Follow Randolph on Twitter" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.wohill.com/images/wo_randolph.jpg" style="margin:3px 0 0 0" /></a> <div id="twitterRG" align="left" style="margin:0 0 0 17px"> <p>Please wait while my tweets load <br /><img src="http://www.wohill.com/images/wo_ajax_loader.gif" /></p> <p><a href="http://twitter.com/randolphguy" target="_blank">If you can't wait - check out what I've been twittering</a></p> </div> <a href="http://twitter.com/nickwick76" title="Follow Nic on Twitter" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.wohill.com/images/wo_nick.jpg" style="margin:3px 0 0 0" /></a> <div id="twitterNW" align="left" style="margin:0 0 0 17px"> <p>Please wait while my tweets load <br /><img src="http://www.wohill.com/images/wo_ajax_loader.gif" /></p> <p><a href="http://twitter.com/nickwick76" target="_blank">If you can't wait - check out what I've been twittering</a></p> </div> </div>

Script blocks also needs to be included to make the calls to the Twitter engine and to update the div-elements. This is also modified a little bit to make the prefix of each tweet to fit our design better:

<script src="twitter.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script> <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"> <!-- Randolph Guy tweets --> getTwitters('twitterRG', { id: 14229645, count: 2, enableLinks: true, ignoreReplies: true, prefix: "<span style="color:#0000FF">Randolph said</span>", clearContents: true }); <!-- Nic Waller tweets --> getTwitters('twitterNW', { id: 5549092, count: 2, enableLinks: true, ignoreReplies: true, prefix: '<span style="color:#0000FF">Nic said </span>', clearContents: true }); </script>

Don't forget to copy the js-file 'Twitter.js' into your system.

One problem is that it only works with one Twitter block when using Internet Explorer (IE). That is if you call the 'getTwitter' function more than once the first one doesn't load. This works fine on Firefox and Safari however. Really annoying of course. Let me know if you have a solution.