Twitter in the sidebar

Table of contents

• Twitter and teaching
• How to make Twitter work inside your blog
• Setting up the plugin
• Adding the Twitter content you want to your site

Twitter and teaching

Twitter is a great place for discovering new content, if you curate your timeline carefully. That means: following accounts that work for you, perhaps creating lists around specific topics, and in some cases blocking or muting terms or accounts.

I rarely block people outright, but recently I just started to unfollow accounts that get on my nerves, even if they provide useful information or are fun otherwise. If it’s a viral or real funny tweet, and I need to see it, it will still reach me, and I don’t need the extra bump in blood pressure when I want just some mindless scrolling. (#TwitterNatureCommunity is great for calming me down!)

Because I follow a ton of fellow East Asia specialists, there are a small truckload of tweets with useful information I want to share with my students on a regular basis. These include new publications, research finds, and amazing images, including from archaeological sites and manuscripts. There are also fun and lighthearted moments, when you see a viral joke applied to history “injokes”.

I want to share with my students how Twitter does not have to be a negative space. It is in fact also a really useful space for building professional and academic connections. But I want to show them this without forcing them to be on Twitter. A well-curated stream in a sidebar widget on the course website where they need to check out the week’s course content anyway is just the ticket!

How to make Twitter work inside your blog

I use a plugin. There are about a million of them –– ok, not really: a keyword search for a Twitter plugin reveals 1,036 items, and a lot are eliminated quickly. My rules state a good plugin is:

• compatible with your version of WordPress (currently on 5.8.3),
• free (or a sturdy “freemium” version, I don’t pay but I may donate for a well-developed plugin)
• updated recently, so you know it’s still developed

And then I look for one with lots of stars that actually does what I want it to do. In my case: I want to show only a small portion of my Twitter feed. “Custom Twitter Feeds” from Smashballoon looked pretty good, until I tried to use it and it didn’t display the quoted tweets’ images: “The free version of the Twitter Feed plugin does not have the feature to display images and videos. This is only available in the Pro version of our plugin.” (Support forum)

So that doesn’t match my criteria, and I’m off to the next one: Feed Them Social, from SlickRemix. It went through a little hiccup when WordPress updated but seems to be back alright. I like its straightforward setup and instructions, but in case you need an extra hand to hold, I’ll walk you through it right here!

Setting up the plugin

1. Install the plugin
2. A new item appears in the left menu: Feed Them – Click on it, or hover over it with the mouse and pick the social media you want to embed in your site. I chose Twitter.

3. Get the Twitter API token: Log in to the account you want to embed in your site.
   • Note! If you are already logged in, and run multiple accounts, make sure you authorize the correct one!

4. If all goes well, it will redirect you back to WordPress, and your “access token” and “access token secret” are now filled out.
5. If you get the “Bad authentication” message but you are sure you filled it out correctly ànd your Token and Secret are filled out, just go through the rest of the page (Follow Button Options, etc) and click “Save all changes”. Chances are the system catches up and you get the green message “Your access token is working! Generate your shortcode on the Settings Page” after you push the Save button.

6. Go to the Settings page of the Feed Them plugin (left side bar)
7. Click on “Select Social Network”, and select “Twitter Feed”

Adding the Twitter content you want to your site

Now you have to decide what you want to display on your site. If you want every single tweet, under “Twitter Shortcode Generator”, pick “User Feed”. Fill out the remaining options as you want, but I leave everything unchanged here, except for “Show Retweets” (yes) and “Show Replies” (yes)

If you want a more focused selection from your Twitter feed, my solution is to use a hashtag with the course number, e.g. #hst259 for my Korean history course. In that case, select “Hashtag, Search and More” for the Feed Type, and fill out from:user_name%#YourHashtag with the appropriate changes, so in my case: from:tinebeest%#hst259 (Again, the only other changes were “Show Retweets” (yes) and “Show Replies” (yes)). This means only when I use that hashtag with the tweet appear in the sidebar.

Next click “Generate Shortcode”, and copy the piece of code that appears. Here is the code for tweets connected to my course HST439: [[fts_twitter twitter_name=@tinebeest tweets_count=6 cover_photo=no stats_bar=no show_retweets=yes show_replies=yes search=from:tinebeest%#hst439]]

Next we go to the Widgets, via the Appearance menu.

Add a custom HTML block, and paste your code. I like to add a little header <h5>Meanwhile on Twitter</h5> or something similar, and stick the Shortcode between <p></p> tags. So this is what my widget block looks like:

<h5>Meanwhile on Twitter</h5>
<p>[[fts_twitter twitter_name=@tinebeest tweets_count=6 cover_photo=no stats_bar=no show_retweets=yes show_replies=yes search=from:tinebeest%#hst439]]</p>

It doesn’t give you the Twitter stream in “Preview” there, so the best thing to do is “Update” the Widgets, and view a page where they are displayed. (Note that the homepage on this site does not display the sidebar widgets).

If nothing shows up, you may have to force the cache to catch up if it’s the first time you use this plugin on your site. Just go to the editing menu bar at the very top on your website, and click on “Clear cache” in the Feed Them Social drop down menu, or otherwise adjust in the settings.

So far I have not yet felt the need to fork out for premium: in general the plugin displays the tweets I want. There may be occasional issues, but it’s more often than not user error, or an update is just around the corner.

I’m very grateful to all the developers who put stuff out there for free for us to play with, thank you so much!! 🙏🏻