Twitter Comments Plugin
:Integrate Twitter Comments in your Site
Twitter Comments Plugin
I’m sure you have encountered a situation where you have posted a link to your blog post on Twitter asking for responses from your followers. However its frustrating that you can’t grab those comments/replies direly to your blog without doing multiple screenshots? Well worry no more! There is a new tool in town called – Chirrup which is basically a Twitter comment system that will do exactly what you always wanted.
Twitter Comments Directly on Your Site
Chirrup is a really simple Twitter comments solution. If you’re familiar with the FriendFeed plugin for WordPress, then this tool won’t be a problem for you. It’s just like a separate component to add to your blog, similar to a widget. The system “Chirrup fetches all of the replies from Twitter, and sorts them by URL so you can have a comment feed for each page in your site.” You can place the comment box anywhere you’d like and style it to your tastes. Users can even send a Twitter comment through the system.
How It Works
To run Chirrup in your site you will need the following:
- Hosting that supports PHP. If you are running wordpress then you wouldn’t have to worry about that.
- Your host must support curl, which means completely vanilla PHP installations may not work. Usually all hosting provider has this enabled by default.
- You should have the ability to add a piece of Javascript to your site’s HTML templates.
Chirrup store comments as they arrive from Twitter, it also uses a small XML file on your server to prevent relying on the database.
1. Chirrup will run either from a dedicated subdomain or from a sub-folder within an existing site. Note down the URL where Chirrup’s folder will be accessible – we’ll use http://chirrup.example.com/ in this example.
2. If you are using Apache, Chirrup already contains a .htaccess file which will forbid visitors from peeking at Chirrup’s XML cache. If you’re using a web server other than Apache, you’ll need to configure this yourself.”
With some small lines of javascript placed where ever you’d prefer, you’re all set to use Chirrup. To use Chirrup on a WordPress blog simply download the contents of Chirrup and upload them to your WordPress plugins directory in their own folder. Piece of cake.
A Solution to Conversation Fragmentation
The system is very simple and easy and also a great solution to the conversation fragmentation nature of services like Twitter. So if you’ve been pretty heated about not getting those comments back on your blog, Chirrup is the best solution out there to bring Twitter replies back to the originating source.
