I added a scrolly-Twitter-thing because I thought it was neat-o. I’ve always liked unobtrusive scrolly bits (tickers); it’s probably got something to do with watching too many news channels and daytime infomercial television, so here we are. At least there’s some activity on the screen now. Kinda.
…
But wait there’s-
-more.
If it wasn’t abundantly obvious, the ticker is a feed of my own Twitter account. I like the idea of microblogging but didn’t use Twitter much because I felt it was too removed from being “mine.” With this, I have tricked myself with a sort of ownership theater (see: security theater) and I might say more crap on Twitter now. I have long had ideas for something like an MOTD (more like MOTW) for the site, but the work involved in building a system for that is not something I want to learn right now, so instead you get an approximation via Twitter.
Curious how I did it? Bloody simple really. Mostly. I used a lovely WordPress plugin called Rotating Tweets, built by some bloke by the name of Martin Tod. So thanks to that guy for the lovely plugin. Do him a favour and look at his website, or something. I can’t say I know what it’s about. Some other country’s governance, I suppose. Remarkable to me is a politician who developed and actively maintains a WordPress plugin.
I used Rotating Tweets in conjunction with another useful plugin (which I started using quite some time back), Header and Footer by Stefano Lissa. He has a site, too, so for consistency’s sake, check that out. It appears this guy develops quite a few WordPress plugins and also uses the blog as a platform to ask for and make donations to children’s charities, so that’s cool.
So I used Header and Footer to insert the Rotating Tweets’ shortcode (that’s WP speak for a bit of encapsulated text that gets caught and converted to something else, like a Twitter feed, before the page displays) right where I wanted it up there. The work was then a case of testing out the various shortcode options (and like some idiot cowboy, I tested them on the live, home page – obviously), and then buggering around with the CSS of the Rotating Tweets plugin so I got it coloured just how I wanted. Although I’m not sold on how it is now – it’s too similar to the rest of the content and I’d like to differentiate it a little more (so expect more live testing at some stage). Thankfully, Rotating Tweets is competently developed and helpfully includes a method for specifying custom CSS that overrides the default CSS in a way that is not nuked after updates (so a child theme kinda deal).
And that’s that for this scrap. Have you watched this yet? I am slightly obsessed. Watch it again.