Note: This is a guest blog post by the team from Barrel.
We added Twitter’s @Anywhere to the Zelkova Ventures website and blog over the weekend. We liked how @Anywhere enabled more engagement with Twitter without being overly intrusive and hope to implement it for other clients who’re active Twitter users.
There are three main things that @Anywhere offers:
- You can embed a Tweet Box, making it easy for users/readers to Tweet right from your site. You can customize the initial text in the box, so this might be useful if you’re trying to encourage people to RT something.
- The Hovercard brings Twitter data right to the page, making it easy to see and follow someone’s Twitter account info without leaving the current site. Also, any username mentioned on the page gets auto-linked to the Twitter account page.
- Connect with Twitter lets users log in to a site/app with their Twitter account. For the Zelkova blog, this wasn’t necessary since it already uses Disqus for commenting with an option for Twitter login.
We first checked out Add Twitter @Anywhere plugin for Wordpress and felt it was too limited for what we wanted to do. We wanted to go beyond just having Hovercards for @usernames and thought @Anywhere could be more integrated with the blog entries. Using the Insert Link Classes plugin, we created a “twitterlink” class that could be called right in the body of post. This way, it would be easy to activate Hovercards on someone’s name and also have that link go to their website instead of their Twitter page. We should note that Insert Link Classes didn’t work out of the box; we had to sift through the comments to find a way to get it to work.
We set up Wordpress to make it easy to enable Hovercards beyond just @usernames.
Next, we added the Tweet Box to the sidebar, which was fairly easy. One thing to note was that because it’s in an iframe, the ability to style the Tweet Box is limited. We prepopulated the box with @ZelkovaVC to encourage a reply tweet from the blog’s readers.
The rest of the Zelokva website runs on ExpressionEngine, which meant adding a few lines of code to the template files. One area where we found @Anywhere helpful was for the company portfolio pages. Each company already has a Twitter feed showing their three latest Tweets, so we were able to add Hovercards for each one.
Overall, implementation was fairly straightforward. We should warn that @Anywhere does slow down the site a bit when it loads. And sometimes you’ll see a bit of a lag on the Hovercards as well, but we’re hoping this is something that’ll improve over time.
