A small part to making it match

Wordpress has plugins, lots and lots of plugins. In my conversion from it to blogofile I wanted to make it match my old site as closely as I could. Having a twitter feed of my latest tweets was something I'd have to get on the site.

Fails

I though I might make a python api call and then pipe that into my sidebar. This worked. But it sucked because I'd have to rebuild the page every tweet. I don't mind static content for my posts and navigation and the like. That's just good caching I feel.

Tweets though are a constantly, or would be for anyone else but me, updating service.

In comes the JavaScript

So in looking for simple things to give me a twitter feed I found Remy Sharp's site and his directions on how to put a javascript based feed into a site.

It was simple as could be, and I had a base, but hard coded feed up an running in short order.

Making it better for blogofile users

Part of open source is giving back. Something I really want to do more of, and I feel am getting into the swing of it a bit more. But that's whatever, I found the useful and perfect plugin, and got it working in blogofile without much trouble.

I now started thinking about how others might like to use this and would not really want to hard code it too much. So I made it into a controller, and configurable by the _config.py file. I made it kinda simple, but a bit overkilled with the folder and an __init__.py, but I was aiming for it to be more work.

import logging

from blogofile.cache import bf

config = {
    "name": "Twitter",
    "description": "Makes a sidebar widget for twitter",
    "priority": 70.0,
    }

def run():
    tweets = bf.config.controllers.tweets
    tweets.logger = logging.getLogger(config['name'])

### Twitter Settings ###
controllers.tweets.enabled = True
tweets = controllers.tweets
tweets.username = "morganiangoose"
tweets.count = 3
tweets.enable_links = 'true'
tweets.ignore_replies = 'false'
tweets.template = ('<li><div class="item">%text% <a href="http://twitter.c'
        'om/%user_screen_name%/statuses/%id%/">%time%</a></div></li><br/>')

<div class="sidebar_item">
<h3>Twitter</h3>
    <script src="http://twitterjs.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/twitter.min.js"
    type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
        getTwitters('tweet', {
            id: '${bf.config.tweets.username}',
            count: ${bf.config.tweets.count},
            enableLinks: ${bf.config.tweets.enable_links},
            ignoreReplies: ${bf.config.tweets.ignore_replies},
            clearContents: true,
            template: '${bf.config.tweets.template}',
            });
    </script>
    <div id="tweet">
    </div>
</div>
<br />