Twitter Comments In the Works

Some time ago I added the Facebook and Twitter tabs into the comments section under each post. The FB comments box post has been quite popular and I've gotten several requests for a tutorial on setting up Twitter as well. Unfortunately, the setup of the Tweet box hasn't really met my expectations. The code to make it work is clumsy and it offered only the ability to authorize my Twitter application, then send tweets with no confirmation the tweets succeeded and no real conversation to contribute to. Yesterday, I began taking steps to expand functionality by writing my own Tweet Box rather than using the one provided by Twitter.

I brought the JS Tweet Box live on this site late last night. All of my testing seems to work and I've even included a Tweet Count for the twitter Tab. For my own use I added a URL shortener using bit.ly to make tweets more efficient. Over the coming days and weeks I'll be adding additional functionality and I'd love to hear any feature desires you have. Right now I'm planning a few things, most of which I've never coded before so this may take some time. Here's a look at what I hope to include:

• Recent Tweets(less than 4 days old) linking to the current page using the Twitter search api
• An optional Follow Me button allowing an authenticated user to add you as a friend with 1 click
• A timeline update confirming a tweet went through
• The ability to directly reply to or follow recent commentors, just as you would on twitter
• A URL shortener integration tutorial, so you may include your own short URLs

Those are the features I'm planning. I've done preliminary work on several of these. In fact I prototyped my own Twitter client during some of the periods where I wasn't posting much. I have a few other ideas I'm investigating, but until I know whether I can do them I'll not mention those. Anyway, thought I'd let my readers know what's coming get a little feedback.

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