Create your own Twitter Badge

I’ve never been a big fan of the Badges created by Twitter.  Though custom themes are possible, you have very little control over exactly what gets displayed.  Fortunately, Twitter has a full API that makes accessing your public timeline realitively simple.  Just remember, this will not work if you have set your updates to Private.

I’ve been playing around with the Twitter API for a while now, creating a full backup of all my posts, and posts of users I follow for faster off line viewing.  When Fail Whale sitings were common place, this allowed me to keep up with stuff, even when Twitter was down.  It never really occured to me, to use this same type of method to create custom Twitter Badges.  I have tried several of the official Badges in the past, with varying levels of success.  My biggest complaint, is that the Javascript is often too bloated, and when Twitter is down, the page would take forever to render.  By calling the JSON directly, the page will continue to load, and the Twitter element will not be displayed unless it can successfully read and parse the JSON.

So, enough about why, here’s the how.  Tumblr doesn’t lend itself to effectively presenting code, hence the link.