Jax Blunt

How to make twitter help your blog soar.

19th April 2015 By Jax Blunt 1 Comment

The official Twitter plugin helps you to share your blog using twitter cards to make your links stand out from the card, gives you a follow button and the ability to customise your embedded tweets. Alongside all this, you get access to enhanced twitter analytics, so what are you waiting for?

3 steps to setting up the official twitter plugin on self hosted wordpress.

Install the plugin.

You’ve probably seen twitter cards attached to tweets before now – they’re the ones with summaries or images attached. They stand out from the stream, and give people an idea what they’re clicking through to. The first step to getting all this goodness on your site is installing the plugin. Go to Plugins >Add new and search for twitter. You’re looking for the official plugin. Once you’ve found it, hit install.

[Note, this plugin requires PHP 5.4 or higher. If you’re not sure whether you’ve got that, it’s a question for your hosting provider.]

Setup post formats.

This official plugin uses post formats to decide what card to share with a post. Post formats are theme reliant – if you’ve already got them active, you’re looking for a radio button probably over there on the right, with a list of possible formats as described here. (If you don’t have them visible, the first thing to do is check the screen options (top left) and make sure that you don’t just have the Format option switched off. See the image below for details.)

If Format isn’t in your screen options list though, that means your theme doesn’t support them. Don’t panic, there are still options. For example if you’re using a Genesis theme, you can grab the code snippets from studiopress here and add them to your child theme functions.php. (You’ve got a child theme, right?)

If you’re not on Genesis there’s an informative article here on how to add them to your theme.

Validating your chosen card types.

The other webpage you’re going to need to make friends with is the twitter card validator itself. For each card type you want to use, you need to validate a post with the right markup. This sounds a bit complicated, but it’s as simple as filling in the setup detail in the plugin (basically your twitter handle) and then either editing old posts to be the format you want (from photo and gallery) and submitting the link to the validator. A normal post comes through as a summary card.

For each card, a good picture is a great idea, although a gallery needs 4. Once you have the cards validated against your domain, any time anyone tweets from your site, a card will go along with the tweet, and you’ll get to see all of it in your enhanced analytics (under your twitter profile).

The twitter plugin also offers an enhanced twitter follow button, and tweet button, but to my mind, the cards are the real winner here. Let me know if you get them set up.

How to choose a host for your shiny new wordpress website.

15th November 2013 By Jax Blunt 10 Comments

So, you’ve listened to the talks on self hosting your website, you’ve read around on the issues that using wordpress.com or blogger or other free systems might imply and you’ve decided to take the leap.

You know you need a domain name, and a host. But what are those things, where do you get them, and what do they mean?

Domain names

The domain name is the bit that you type at the top of your browser, the person friendly word based address for your website. (A more technical explanation of all of this can be found here.) You buy it from a registrar, and I tend to recommend that you use a registrar separate to your host, because if it all goes pear shaped you don’t want to be trying to transfer domain names as well as all your files. Personally I use lowcostnames – they are reasonably priced, and don’t sting you on renewal.

Then it’s time to look for a host.

Hosting

When you’re just starting out, you don’t need a dedicated server (the machine that all the actual files sit on), shared hosting will be fine. This just means that you are using a server that lots of other people use too, and that you are sharing the IP – there’s some funky software that keeps all the sites separate both in terms of people viewing it, and in terms of you managing it at the back end.

You won’t need a huge amount of storage space to begin with – because you are optimising your pictures for the web before you upload them, aren’t you? And you won’t need a massive amount of bandwidth (this is how the traffic to and from your site is measured) until you’re seeing a reasonable number of visitors.

Personally, I look for CPanel as the hosting interface – it’s well structured and has everything you can need. It also (usually)provides a one click installation for wordpress, meaning that your life stays simple and you don’t have to start installing via ftp (which is not that difficult, but just adds to the stress levels when you’re starting out). Do check that the host you are looking at does provide this though, it has been known for people to turn it off.

Some recommendations (which include affiliate links – please see my affiliate linking policy if you’ve any queries about this):

TSOhost – I haven’t used them personally, but I know a lot of people who have and seem very happy. Use code blogfest to get 10% off (not sure whether that applies to their lowest priced package).

EUKhost – we’ve been recommending these people for around 10 years, and not heard any complaints.

ezpzhosting – we have a server here, and they are excellent.

You can also check out a variety of webhosting review sites – be aware that many of the links on those will be affiliate links as well.

Once you’ve got the domain name and hosting sorted out, and pushed your one click button, the next step will be making your site look pretty – coming soon.

Twitter cards for blogspot users

8th September 2013 By Jax Blunt Leave a Comment

I’ve previously written on implementing twitter cards on wordpress and in a comment on that post was asked if it could be achieved for blogger.

The answer is of course yes, and I found a number of articles claiming to achieve it, but none really seemed straightforward to me, so here’s my own recipe.

(To recap, a twitter card is a tweet with some extra bits on it. Like this one. This is a twitter card set up against a blogspot blog, using the instructions below.)

https://twitter.com/liveotherwise/status/375999874355183616

Header code.

You need to put some code in the header of your template.

I’ve put my snippet right before the closing tag.(click to see bigger)

My code looks like this (but without all the tags which wordpress is helpfully adding).:

Two points
1) Change the @YOURTWITTERNAMEHERE in this code to your own twitter name.
2) This code is relying on you having set a metaDescription on each post. You should be doing that for search engine friendliness reasons (I’m assuming you want to be friendly to search engines anyway.)

If you don’t have this switched on, this twitter card configuration won’t work.

Turning on metaDescriptions

To turn metaDescriptions ON you need to go to Settings> Search description and enable search descriptions.

Then when you’re editing, fill it in on the left.

Validate your new twitter card

After you’ve done all this, you’ll want to check that your card validates.

Go to the Twitter card validator on twitter itself and use the try card section. Or if you’re feeling brave, just skip to validate and apply – filling in the url of a post you’ve made that has a description and everything else.

Once you’re happy with how it validates, you have to apply to twitter for the code to actually work – in my experience this takes minutes. There are of course other twitter cards as well as summary cards, you’d have to tweak the code above if you want a different one, if you do that, please do let me know!

How to get a new twitter widget to fix that broken tweetstream.

17th June 2013 By Jax Blunt 2 Comments

Twitter API upgrade leads to broken twitter widgets

At the end of last week, Twitter upgraded API from 1.0 to 1.1. (API is how external sites link to twitter’s code.) The result was that lots and lots of tweetstreams on blogs and sites around the internet broke.

It’s likely that if you’re in that situation, you’re hoping that a developer is just going to roll out a fix, you’ll press an upgrade button, and all will be well again. Sadly, that’s not the case. The new design means that you’ve got to create a twitter app to make most plugins work, or your developer may need your twitter login to do it for you.

The twitter widget – a simpler option

There is a simpler option. Remove the plugin/ broken widget, and get yourself a shiny new twitter widget. No log in needed, and all customisable.

Pop over to twitter here and fill in the settings.

There are some options you can use to customise your code.

The ones you are most likely to want are:

data-theme=”dark” – light! Always light! (The default is light, so if you want light, you don’t need this bit at all.)
data-link-color=”#cc0000″ – probably nice to set this to be the same colour as the navigation links on your site?
data-tweet-limit=”3″ – personally I think 5 is a nice number.

But I don’t want a widget!

For wordpress obviously there are a number of plugins. Some of them, including the one I’ve been using based on the Genesis framework, haven’t been updated yet. The drawback is that even if you use them, you have to create a twitter app, which means going to twitter, and doing set up, and putting in your user details. By the time you’ve done that, you might as well do the widget instead. The widget solution is actually more straightforward, and isn’t affected by rate limits, whereas I think apps are.

What do you do with your widget code? You need to paste it into your sidebar. For wordpress I’ve used a text widget which takes html, and that’s worked fine so far.

As always, do check out the terms and conditions of use of this sort of thing – for example, while embedding a single tweet is fine, it looks to me that a conversation with interspersed comment is not (see Display Requirements, point 6), which makes me wonder how come storify is still running. But there you go. Enjoy your widget!

Twitter cards – what they are and how to integrate.

15th June 2013 By Jax Blunt 2 Comments

Twitter cards are the latest upgrade to twitter that allows you to add extra information to your tweet when sharing a link. They come in a number of different formats – the one that is most likely to be useful to a business or personal blog is the summary card, which adds a headline, excerpt and pic. Big platforms like wordpress.com have already implemented cards for their users – but it’s easy to do if you’re self hosted as well.

Still not sure what they are? Here’s an example – my first tweeted article from technology solved that includes a twitter card.

https://twitter.com/liveotherwise/status/345925038886748160

The card gives you that extra bit under the 140 characters, and hopefully makes your tweet that little bit more enticing to encourage click through. You’ve probably seen them on twitter from newspaper articles at the very least.

As you might imagine, there are a number of different ways to implement them for your site. Yoast’s WordPress SEO has a twitter section under social if you’re using it, or you can go for a standalone plugin that just does the card integration, which is what I’ve opted for this time, using Twitter Cards.

The plugin doesn’t require any set up, but you do then go to validate it at twitter itself. I was a bit dismayed once I’d filled in all the fields to get a message saying I’d get feedback in a few weeks – but being the impatient sort, I tested it anyway, and it worked fine.

Big hint: twitter cards apply to individual articles, *not* to your home page. If you look for the markup in your homepage you won’t find it, and if you try to validate your home page it will fail. Work from a post within your site. (There, I’ve just saved you the ten minutes I wasted doing it wrong earlier!) Also, it seems that short link tweets from the jetpack publicise don’t get the card associated with them, possibly because it’s not showing the validated domain?

And that’s about all there is to it. So off you pop and give it a whirl, and let me know how you get on. If you found this article useful, don’t forget to follow the blog either via email or on G+.