Adding a Twitter feed

It’s easier than you think :) and since the first version of this, it’s become even easier!

New way to add a Twitter feed

Go to Appearance / Widgets menu in your site’s WordPress Dashboard.

You’ll note that on the right, there’s ‘main sidebar’ area, which probably has a couple of things there already (typically including ‘Recent posts’ for your latest blog posts), and in the middle there’s an array of possible widgets to put there.

Click and drag the ‘Custom HTML’ one to the main sidebar area. If it is not already showing the space for the title and content, expand it, by clicking on the little triangle.

Give it a title like ‘My Tweets’, and paste the HTML below in the currently empty big box. Click ‘save’. Done!

<a class="twitter-timeline"
href="https://twitter.com/yourescortsite"
data-tweet-limit="10">
YourEscortSite tweets</a>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

.. obviously changing ‘yourescortsite’ to the name of your Twitter account.

Old way

Before, you needed to go to your Twitter account’s Settings menu and get a specific code number, just for your account. That was included in the old HTML code and you needed to specifically exclude replies to you being included in the displayed feed. (Miss doing that, and you’d start advertising clients and others!)

Because this was the official way of doing it, it still works, but it involves an extra layer of faff now.

Still relevant, still important

You can also add the code to any page or post but you must use the text mode of editing rather than the visual one to do so, otherwise WordPress will ‘cleverly’ convert the < characters into ‘&lt;’ (they’re special characters to browsers) and it won’t work.

You need to know that however you do it, some adblockers count it as an ad, and so not every visitor will see it…

Similarly, if visitors have blocked third party scripts from running, it won’t be visible to them either.

Since WordPress 3.5, you can also put a tweet’s URL on a line by its own and it will be treated specially:

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