How to Add Your Tweets to Your Posterous Sidebar

Jul 27, 2010
 

I’ve recently been playing around with Posterous, the "dead simple place to post everything" as an alternative to Wordpress to host this blog. Unfortunately, the migration process is still a little too painful for me to make the switch right now, but I have learned a few things about the features and limitations of Posterous. One thing I was surprised to learn is that you cannot add JavaScript to custom themes. This means that, out of the box, you cannot add a Twitter widget (which uses JavaScript) to your sidebar. I really like showing my recent tweets on my website, because lots of people (ok, mainly my family) don’t know how to use Twitter but they can go to my website and see my recent updates. But I discovered a simple workaround to this problem on Posterous that I wanted to share.

Even though you can’t add JavaScript to your Posterous theme, you can add an iframe, which lets you embed HTML and Javascript from another site. If you style it nicely, no one will realize that the content is not a native part of your Posterous site. You can put the HTML page wherever you like, although I find it very convenient to use my Dropbox "Public" folder (if you’re not already a Dropbox user, go here and sign up, it’s FREE).

So to add the Twitter widget to your Posterous sidebar, you’ll want to do the following:

  1. Download my twitter.html page and put it somewhere you can use it (such as your Dropbox “Public” folder)
  2. Edit the html page and replace my username with yours (line 40)
  3. Add the following iframe code to your sidebar HTML

<iframe id="tweets" scrolling="no" width="225" height="1000" frameborder="0" src="http://<YOUR_URL>/twitter.html"/>

Now you should see your latest 10 tweets in your sidebar. If you want, you can use the Twitter Profile Widget wizard to change the look and style of your tweet list. At the end, the wizard will give you some code – just paste it between the <body> tags in the html file. For more on how to edit your theme and change your sidebar HTML, see Posterous Custom Themes.

Comments (2)

May 05, 2011
Phoenix Abraxas said...
Thank body... works great!
Jun 13, 2011
Answers FM said...
That's really cool. but the problem is viable for all apps, you can't add you sharing widget and you can't autopost to posterous and all that stuff.
http://blog.answersfm.com

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