I have a bit of a mea culpa this week – turns out that when I told you how to embed a Twitter feed a couple of weeks ago I was giving you a way which, while acceptable and functional, was both harder to use and gave less customisation options. With that in mind, here’s how to create much more attractive, functional Twitter feeds anywhere on the School Jotter platform.
First of all, you’re going to want to go to your twitter page and click your profile icon in the top right, then click Settings. Alternatively, visit twitter.com/settings/account.
You’ll be presented with the Settings screen – here you’ll want to click Widgets in the bottom-left.
The resultant page should be blank except for a Create New button in the top right (unless you’ve done this before. Click the Create New button and you’ll arrive here.
This is where you can customise the widget as much as you’d like. For now, we’re just going to focus on the user timeline, but if you’ve created Twitter lists (for example if you’re part of a multi-academy trust) you might want to use those too – they’re available in the tabs along the top. You can also create feeds based on searches – this is how we’ve created our “new schools” feed visible here.
Let’s go over the options available to you:
- Username – Ideally your own school’s username, but it doesn’t have to be
- Options – Choose whether you want to include people’s replies to your tweets (we recommend excluding them) and to auto-expand photos (we recommend doing this).
- Height – How tall do you want your widget to be – we recommend leaving it as the default
- Theme – Depending on your website style you may want your widget in either a white or a dark grey style – this is entirely up to you.
- Link color – Again, depending on your style you may wish to change this
Now click Create Widget, and a little box of HTML code will appear at the bottom of the page. Copy it to your clipboard.
This next section might be familiar to people from a few weeks ago when I talked about embedding widgets into Site. Log into School Jotter Site, enter Edit mode and click Insert > Embedded Code.
Choose where you want your widget to go, then click Custom in the tab on the left and paste your code in the box provided.
Save and publish your page and the Twitter widget will work its magic, giving you a shiny new Twitter feed that’s interactive and informative.
