test post: live twitter debate feed - help needed

Note: if you are reading this, i need your advice. I'm looking for a way to display my live twitter feed in a post, not the sidebar/template. I want the feed to show the most recent X posts and preferably take up the width of the post area. Below are my attempts to use the badges provided by Twitter, but I'm interested in any other options to display a "full sized" feed that won't force people to go to twitter.com/baratunde or be limited to my sidebar twitter plugin.

Update. Dec 1 @ 13:26
I removed the original test embeds cause they were mad ugly.
I may have found a solution, but check the next post to see my offer of funds for someone to solve this for me.

Comments

[Carl Tashian]

Baratunde -- Take a look around for a wordpress plugin that will read your Twitter RSS feed into a post when someone comes to the site.

feed://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/820585.rss

Actually, does it even need to be a post at all? It might be easier to set up as a page.

[Kenya]

Do you want it to be a post or take up the size of a post? If you just want it to show up, for instance, at the top of your front page, you can modify your front page template and use the Twitter Tools function: aktt_sidebar_tweets().

There's also a function tweet_download_interval() in the Twitter Tools plugin that sets the interval to 30 minutes, change it to a shorter interval (of course not something that would shut your web host down).

[baratunde]

thanks Kenya and Carl.

Ideally, it would NOT be a post. I'd occasionally like to load a special box above my front page posts that showed the three most recent tweets. I would activate this box only during live twitter coverage of events like the debates tonight and saturday.

I want to be able to tell folks to simply go to baratunde.com at 8pm and follow the event, for example.

I'm nervous about hacking the front page template however, so i'd settle for a new "Twitter Live" page that did the same thing. Then I could advertiser baratunde.com/twitterlive

1. is it easy to insert code on the front page above my posts then comment it out when I'm done with the event? like I said, I'm nervous about messing with the existing template

2. i already use Twitter Tools for my sidebar. If i mess with the settings for these special live events, won't that jack up my sidebar? For example, showing the most recent 3 tweets instead of one would show them atop the front page AND in the sidebar right?

Basically, I'm not a Wordpress jockey, and I thought embedding a screen/feed within a post would be the simplest. It would also let me show the feed over on Jack and Jill Politics which is a blogger blog and one whose template I REALLY don't want to jack with

[Carl Tashian]

In answer to 1), check this page:

http://www.mealldubh.org/index.php/software/how-to-include-an-rss-feed-in-wordpress/

You should be able to add this bit of code to one your templates and get rid of it later. If you want something that doesn't require you to edit the templates, it would have to be a javascript solution of some sort, or a WordPress plugin that lets you put a tag into a post or page body, like "[twitterfeed]" -- look around, maybe there's something like that out there.

[Kenya]

You can copy your existing template page and only change the copy. But yes if you use TwitterTools, changing the settings would mess up your sidebar. It might be possible to make a copy of the TwitterTools plugin (renaming it) to have separate settings. I don't have time to look into that right now though.