A couple weeks ago, my friend Jimmy saw a modification of the Twitter JavaScript badge that I had whipped up for the coming site redesign and liked what he saw. He decided to integrate it into his site, but wanted a few more features: most notably, the ability to display more than once recent tweet.

So last week I took an hour to clean it up and improve it. The end result is as follows:

The main features of this modification are:

• The twitterer’s icon, which links to their twitter page.
• One or more of the twitterer’s recent tweets.
• Tweet date-stamp that links to that tweet’s permalink.
• More CSS hooks for more advanced styling, including: ‘first’, ‘last’, ‘even’, and ‘odd’ classes on the list item tags.

You can download following package which contains a stand-alone copy of the JavaScript, plus an example theme (CSS) for it that mimics much of the Twitter look (as seen above):

twitter_statuses_badge-0.1.tar.gz

Please note that the included example CSS stylesheet does not render exactly as intended in Firefox and has not been tested in Internet Explorer for Windows. It was hacked together pretty quickly and tested in Safari, but does fail fairly gracefully in IE for Mac¹. I’ll leave those fixes as an exercise for the reader.

I’d highly suggest also taking a peek at Jon Aquino’s modifications as well, because he’s got a fix for date parsing in IE (it doesn’t appear to work in IE for the Mac, though) and provides a similar hack with no additional CSS hooks and such.

I do intend to release additional features that I’m currently developing for my site so check the development page for the latest release.

I hope you all find it useful! I also am interested to hear if anyone wants it wrapped into a Textpattern plug-in.

¹ If I didn’t personally have a collection of Classic Macs, I probably wouldn’t even bother testing it anymore.