Smashing WordPress: Beyond The Blog

Chapter 15. INTEGRATING THE SOCIAL WEB

Before digging into the various techniques used to display and connect to the social Web, it is important not to forget the most obvious integration tool offered: RSS feeds. In its most simple form, you've got the RSS widget that ships with WordPress, and it easily lets you show off content from an RSS feed. And today, any social Web service, app, community, or whatever has an RSS feed for you to play with, which means that a lot of the integration of these services you may want can be done using RSS. From showing off your latest tweet to mashing up a lifestream, it's all about RSS most of the time.

So when you want to flash your latest finished book saved to www.anobii.com, consider the RSS feed (or their widget) before you start looking for plugins or hacking your own solutions. Chances are the service you want to show off your latest actions/saved items/whatever from already transmits this data with RSS. You should never make things harder than they are.

Now it's time to get your hands dirty!

Show off Your Twitter

There is certainly no doubt that the rise of Twitter has changed things. These days everyone and their cat tweets, at least among the techie crowd, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down. So while 140 characters is quite a limitation to someone used to punching out 3,000-character blog posts, it can still be quite a tool for online publishers.

If you or your brand are on Twitter, it is likely you'll want to promote the Twitter account ...