Blazing Minds

Earlier today, I took my blog offline while I experimented with the new Tweet button from Twitter and though it does look nice, I still prefer Topsy!

Saying that though I did have some fun with updating the code that is used to creat the new button from Twitter, yes I know my coding skills are nothing to boast about but if they work, that’s fine by me

Anyhow this is the code that I grabbed from the Twitter Goodies page for adding the Twitter Button on my blog:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”horizontal” data-via=”BlazingMinds” data-related=”RemBeatZ:For some awesome music”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script>

This will place a Tweet Button like this on my blog. After adding the code I noticed that I had a few problems when the Tweet Button was on the main page of the blog, as it would only tweet the home url and not the posts url. So after plenty of playing around I updated it to.

<a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”horizontal” data-url=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” data-text=”<?php the_title(); ?>” data-via=”BlazingMinds” data-related=”RemBeatZ:For some awesome music”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script>

Now that seemed to have done the trick, what next?

My next idea was to use the post author in the Tweet Button for the related option, which seemed a bit daunting at first, but then I remembered that I had the coding already which was available in the Author box on the bottom of the blog posts, so the finished code ended up looking like this.

<a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”horizontal” data-url=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” data-text=”<?php the_title(); ?>” data-via=”BlazingMinds” data-related=”<?php the_author_meta( ‘twitter’ ); ?>:Author of the post”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script>

Replacing the information in the data-related variable with php the_author_meta( ‘twitter’ ); ?>:Author of the post now pulls in the information from the authors bio, where I had added an extra field for the authors twitter name, so now when the Tweet Button is used once the tweet has been posted it will now recommend the author of the post.

So why haven’t I implemented the new button on Blazing Minds?

Well to put it in simple terms, I don’t like it, it’s good to play around with, but as I said earlier I do prefer Topsy, I noticed that the counts were different between the two Tweet Buttons, with Topsy giving a more correct amount of tweets that the Twitter button, also Topsy has that great little extra of adding a “Top” section to the Tweet Button showing how popular your tweet is with influential tweeters

Now before anyone starts commenting and saying, this isn’t working or that isn’t working, don’t! As I mentioned earlier I’m NOT a coder, never having been I was just simply experimenting with the options of the new Twitter Button, so please don’t come asking me if it doesn’t work on your site!

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Blogging Tips, Twitter, Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.