I started using Twitter a few weeks back and I have now added my recent tweets to the sidebar over on the right (at least if you’re reading this on the website and not in a feedreader). I am using the Twitter Widget Pro plugin for WordPress developed by Xavisys. Installation was simple – I just downloaded and unzipped the plugin directory ‘twitter-widget-pro’ on my PC and then uploaded it to the wp-content/plugins directory on my server. I activated the plugin from the WordPress plugins admin screen and then on the widgets admin screen dragged and dropped it into place on the sidebar and adjusted the configuration to grab my feed from Twitter. Sweet. The only problem I have at the moment is that I’ve set it to display the last eight tweets and it’s actually only giving me six. Oh well. No biggie.
I’ve also reduced the overall font size a smidge for all the content on the blog. Not completely convinced about the result as it currently stands and I may yet come up with a different solution, but with the extra information density in the sidebar, the old font size just made the overall page layout a little hard to look at.
I’ve actually had a Twitter account for over a year, but have never found much reason to use it. However I’ve started following a few folks recently and have also started tweeting from time to time myself – mostly pointers to interesting stuff I find online. It was kind of cool to be able to send a question this morning to the well-known economist Nouriel Roubini about something he had tweeted and get a response from him in just a few minutes.