Don't you love it when a plan comes together? In this case our
"plan" is to bring you interesting design and development tools and
techniques to make you (or your clients) more successful on the Web.
Today,
let's look at a few recent jQuery plugins that will help you tap into the
overwhelming popularity of... Twitter.
Tweetlink
is a very handy jQuery plugin that enables website visitors to select a
button or link (using TweetLink) and when clicked, automatically shortens
the URL of the current page using bit.ly, sending the user to Twitter with
the status box already filled in.
JTwitter
is a jQuery API plugin that when given a Twitter username retrieves and
returns a JavaScript object with user details such as followers &
following counts, full name, homepage URL, etc.
Juitter is a jQuery plugin that
is being used actively by quite a few developers. The plugin can show a live
"tweet" stream, tweets from or to a user, and tweets containing a
specific word. Juitter has support for multiple users, and developers have
the option of restricting search by language. And of course, it's fully
customizable with a stylesheet. Here's a quick screenshot of how Juitter
could look on your Web property:
TweetQuote is another
jQuery plugin (combining Twitter's open Search API and a few basic AJAX
calls) that pulls the latest Twitter tweets based on search terms for
display on a website. Simply change the load parameter to a desired phrase
and you're off and running. Users can even add advanced options (everything
from refresh rates to animation speeds and language requests) and the
styling of their choice. Here's a sample screenshot of the default
TweetQuote install using the Tweet search for "Obama":
