Twitter provides urls for accessing a timeline or to specific posts. These can be used to present twitter content within jekyll.

Code for this site in held in git bitbucket so feel free to clone or wander the code.

Twitter timeline

Modified the _config.yml to specify appropriate URLs for external incoming feeds. The URLs for a timeline can be collected from publish.twitter.com

Create a new fixed pages/twitter.md that specifies the feed to display in the frontmatter, and a revised 2 column layout:

---
layout: front2col
permalink: /twitter/
title: Twitter
taxonomy: news
tags: [twitter]
feedurl: twitter.timeline
---

The _layout/front2col.html fills the left column with postcards matching having the twitter tag or twitter: YAML. The right column is filled by fetching the specified feed in the config (site.feed.twitter.timeline) provided by twitter using the remote_include plugin.

This technique should allow for arbitary feeds and posts to be displayed by offering a new page with frontmatter and by setting the _config.yml. It works for twitter since the timeline feed is a simple http call and directly embeddable HTML - easily automatable.

Including specific twitter posts

Twitter provides a page to provide an embeddable HTML snippit. Problematic is that the snippit needs to be manually cut-n-pasted. A bit of investigation as to how the page works reveals the URL that provides a JSON response - perfect for automation. Add that URL into the _config.yml.

A post that wants to include a twitter card can specifiy the card number (obtainable from the twitter URL) in the YAML front matter as twitter: This also allows the post to be identified by the timeline page.

Then use a liquid tag to include in a post:-

  {% include twitter.html data-align="right" card=page.twitter %}

The _includes/twitter.html collects the appropriate URL from _config.yml, inserts the username and twitter card number before using the remote_include plugin to fetch the JSON response. Another plugin jsonball parses that response into liquid variables, all that remains is to output the HTML value from the JSON.

Posts in series

While posts are generally independant, often they can be collected together in a logical series. These technical posts on jekyll are an example.

This can be done by using the collections ability in jekyll but this requires updating a config or data file. Here it is done by adding a YAML variable into the post front matter specifying the series to be part of, so each post specifies for itself where it associates.:

---
title: "Code layer: the logic"
series: "Project zodiac"
---

The _includes/series.html creates the list by finding posts with a matching YAML and the html is included in the default layout for a post _layouts/post.html