I recently worked with Magnify Digital on a website for a very interesting group of people in the Fraser Valley. These folks are concerned about Air Quality and thus have come up with a website and community to address these issues.
A big part of the website was the social media aspect. Thus facebook, twitter and youtube feature prominently on the website. There are plenty of WordPress plugins that allow you to display your latest tweets, but I wanted a simpler solution. The following piece of code proved to be just what I needed:
<?php
$username = "yourTwitterUsername";
$limit = "1"; // Number of tweets to pull in.
/* These prefixes and suffixes will display before and after the entire block of tweets. */
$prefix = ""; // Prefix - some text you want displayed before all your tweets.
$suffix = ""; // Suffix - some text you want displayed after all your tweets.
$tweetprefix = "<p>"; // Prefix - some text you want displayed before each tweet.
$tweetsuffix = "</p>"; // Suffix - some text you want displayed after each tweet.
$feed = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=" . $limit;
function parse_feed($feed, $prefix, $tweetprefix, $tweetsuffix, $suffix) {
$feed = str_replace("<", "<", $feed);
$feed = str_replace(">", ">", $feed);
$feed = str_replace(""", "\"", $feed);
$feed = str_replace("'", "'", $feed);
$clean = explode("<content type=\"html\">", $feed);
$amount = count($clean) - 1;
echo $prefix;
for ($i = 1; $i <= $amount; $i++) {
$cleaner = explode("</content>", $clean[$i]);
echo $tweetprefix;
echo $cleaner[0];
echo $tweetsuffix;
}
echo $suffix;
}
$twitterFeed = file_get_contents($feed);
parse_feed($twitterFeed, $prefix, $tweetprefix, $tweetsuffix, $suffix);
?>
I’ve participated in a few “Ask The Experts” panels in the past few months and couldn’t help but notice that Social Media is quite the hot topic right now. People are very keen in learning how to use Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc… Most attendees are curious about how it works, why anyone would invest the time and energy, what’s the ROI and if it’s the right avenue for their business. These are all good questions and there are simply no easy answer. It really depends on who your audience is and where they are.
A funny thing happened to me last Friday which demonstrates how complicated and unpredictable it is to explain the power of Social Media.
I have a Twitter account and follow mostly designers and WordPress developers. This allows me to find out about latest tips, tutorials and website development news. Cameron Moll posted a tweet to a “mesmerizing” YouTube video which caught my attention. I clicked the link and watched a video taken at Kuroshio Sea which is the 2nd largest aquarium in the world.
The video is indeed breathtaking, but I was curious about the music. I watched and listened to the video a couple of times and wanted to find out who was singing. Using my iPhone, I Shazammed it and got the name of the song, band and album. A quick search on YouTube led me to a video of Barcelona singing live in San Diego. I watched a few more videos and decided to visit Barcelona’s page on MySpace. Listened to a few more clips and then I was off to iTunes and bought the album.
I’m not sure that a marketer could have predicted this, but I’m convinced that Social Media is worth investing in.
As social bookmarking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Linked in become more and more popular, these days, I find myself being asked to make adjustments to several WordPress websites by adding social bookmarking links and icons to the sidebar. After 2 such web updates this week, I was asked by a friend to send me the code so that they could add it to their site. So instead of doing the work and sending it to him, I thought I would share it with you all.
The following examples are just code snippets that you can add to your sidebar.php template file. These snippets will not work if your website use sidebar widgets. (That’s not exactly true, but it’s a bit more complicated.)
The first example is very simple and can be seen live on the kitsilano.ca website.
First you’ll need to edit your sidebar.php template and add the following lines of code:
<h2>Follow Us</h2>
<ul>
<li class="rss">
<a href="[insert your rss link here]">Get our Feed</a>
</li>
<li class="twitter">
<a href="[insert your twitter link here]">On Twitter</a>
</li>
</ul>
Next you can adjust the styling by adding this piece of code to your style.css
#sidebar li.rss {background:url(images/rss.gif) 0 50% no-repeat;}
#sidebar li.twitter {background:url(images/twitter.gif) 0 50% no-repeat;}
#sidebar li.rss a, #sidebar li.twitter a {padding-left:20px;}
The icons will also have to be uploaded in your templates’ images folder. You can use your own icons or grab the ones that I’ve used by downloading the zip file.
The second example may look a bit more complex, but is just as easy and can be seen on the mudcreative.com sidebar.
First insert these lines of code in your sidebar.php:
<div id="social_media">
<h2>Follow Us</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="[insert your link to linked in here]"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/linkedin.png" alt="View our linked in profile" width="32" height="32" border="0" /></a></li>
<li><a href="[insert your link to twitter here]"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/twitter.png" alt="On Twitter" width="32" height="32" border="0"></a></li>
<li><a href="[insert your link to rss feed here]"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/rss.png" alt="Via our RSS feed" width="32" height="32" border="0" /></a></li>
<li><a href="[insert your link to facebook here]"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/facebook.png" alt="On Facebook" width="32" height="32" border="0"></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
Depending on what your stylesheet already contains, you may need to make a few tweaks, but it should be pretty straightforward. Here is zip file with the code snippets and icons. Have fun.
