The Chirp Action (and some basic CSS styling) can look like anything you like. It’s deliberately basic, but if you inspect the generated HTML in your browser (use the Developer tools, since the HTML is created with JavaScript – it’s not part of the page source itself), you will see that there is a clean set of tags you can hang your styles on. Here’s the basic block:
div class="chirp"
p
tweet content (@tags and inline links linked up)
/p
span class="meta"
time ago, linked
author, linked
/span
... repeat per tweet ...
/div
So you can apply all sorts of style to this structure. To begin with, you could make a border or block between each tweet and the next by styling the span.meta. You could make a border around the entire thing by styling the div.chirp. You could set a font and link styles by extending div.chirp, and make the meta part smaller and gray by extending span.meta.
The real problem with the official Twitter stuff is that it injects a cookie and some non-presentational JavaScript into the page and lets Twitter track your site and your visitors. It’s basically just as evil as the Facebook Like button. Do a little work to make the Chirp list look the way you want it to, and you’ll be rewarded with a page that’s uniquely yours.
Walter
On Feb 8, 2013, at 3:03 AM, Mark Lawrence wrote:
Hi Waltd,
Thanks for your reply.
I did try that and it did work, i.e. there was a basic list of tweets from twitter.
But what I’d really like it the ‘tweet deck’ widget in place from twitter. Or have a missed something with the Chirp action?