Why is this important? Now your website users can follow you on Twitter with one click, instead of needing to visit your actual Twitter webpage and potentially lose track of your website.

The process of embedding the new Twitter follow button on your website or blog is extremely easy. Click here to get your own code. Once you get the code for your Twitter name simply embed it into your website or blog (template PHP files if you’re using WordPress), and upload your files. The end result will look like this (try it out!):

Follow @BeantownDesign

1. Can you make a background behind individual Tweets?
2. Can you put the date on it’s own separate line?

As the case goes with a lot of things these days jQuery to the rescue! Check out the demo to see both of these things in action, and then continue reading to see how to accomplish these things with jQuery and download the source files.

View Demo

The jQuery and CSS code to make this happen came from Chris over at CSS-Tricks. I slimmed down and edited it to make it work for me. Here is a zip of the files used for the demo so you can download and edit it as you want.

Download Files

You’ll see in the head of the index page the jQuery which makes it work. The line you need to change is the following:

First replace the part I highlighted in Blue “ilz_” with your Twitter user name.

Next, replace “count=5″ with the number of tweets you want to show up on your page.

Other than that, you should be able to style the rest of the text, links, etc. as long as you know basic CSS. Enjoy!

One of the great things about Twitter is that you rarely ever go to the actual site. You can use a program like Tweetie or TweetDeck to send all your Tweets. Another great thing is the ability to embed your recent Tweets onto other websites. It’s a rather simple process, so check out my demo and then keep reading to learn how you can embed your Tweets on your page.

 <script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/beantowndesign.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=3"></script>

Copy the above code and paste it right into your XHTML code on your webpage, (right in the body).

All you need to do is replace where I have “beantowndesign”. That is my Twitter user name, replace it with yours. The other thing you get to decide is how many of the most recent posts you want to show. Change the part where it says “count=1″ to however many Tweets you want to show up. For example, in the demo I decided to show my last 3 Tweets.

So that’s all there is to it.. how you style the text, links, and surrounding environment for the feed is up to you and your creativity.