eFrog Digital Design |

Hi tadpoles…

So, a week or two back, we showed you how to outfit your blog with Twitter Tweet, and Facebook Like buttons. Imagine our surprise when, less than a week later, Twitter announced their new . From the official page:

“Web Intents provide popup-optimized flows for working with Tweets & Twitter Users: Tweet, Reply, Re-tweet, Favorite, and Follow. They make it possible for users to interact with Twitter content in the context of your site, without leaving the page or having to authorize a new app just for the interaction. Web intents are mobile friendly, and super easy to implement.”

Now, Web Intents API sounds awfully technical, and very grand, and the functionality really looks sweet, but happily, it turns out that actually setting it up is a lot less of a hassle than you’d think, so we thought we’d quickly walk you through it.

To get started, you’ll need the “interestingly” named plug-in, . This plug-in pre-dates (it’s been around since November 2010) Twitter’s Web Intents, but the smart folks at to take advantage of the newly released functionality. Blackbird Pie is compatible with WP 3.0 and up, but you always keep your WP install updated, right? Right. So, go ahead, install and activate the plug-in.

Now, when you want to include a live tweet in your post, you’ll need the URL to the status. You’ll find that in the timestamp, under the tweet. So for example, here’s a tweet that I made today:

The timestamp reads 1 hour ago, and if you click on it, you’ll find it’s a link to the individual tweet page. Look at the browser address bar. In this case it looks like this:

Now, simply copy that address and paste it into your blog-post at the point you want the tweet to appear, like this:

Aaaannnnd, save your post. This is what it’ll look like. Notice everything is live and clicking say the Reply link will pop up a floating box, ready to reply to that tweet. Same for Re-Tweet, Favourite, any links in the tweet, and even the tweeter’s bio:

Pretty cool, no?…Something to remember. Protected tweets may be copyright. Play nice and ask, if there’s any doubt.

There’s more functionality in the Web Intents API, but this is a good a start…
Off you go now tadpoles, go make your blogs MORE beautiful and awesome!