TL Tweets - Free WordPress Tweet Archive Theme

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TL Tweets – Free WordPress Theme

By Leland Fiegel. Posted on the 25th of August, 2010 | 23 Comments

This is a free tweet archive theme for WordPress, based off of my own tweet archive site. It contains no images and made up of pure CSS (with a few CSS3 properties), and supports custom WordPress 3.0 menu and background support.

How To Set Up A Tweet Archive

First of all, this theme looks really weird if you try to use it for an actual blog. It’s designed to be used to as a tweet archive. If you don’t know how to set one up, please refer to this tutorial: How To Create a Searchable Tweet Archive with WordPress.

Basically all you need to do is backup as many of your current tweets as you possibly can using a service like TweetBackup or BackupMyTweets, export them as an XML file, and import it using WordPress’ built-in importer.

Then to automatically grab new tweets, you’ll need to install the Twitter Tools plugin by Alex King and go through the authorization process.

Inspiration

The idea for this theme is definitely inspired by Douglas Bowman’s tweet archive theme and the idea behind it.

Conclusion

Ever since I customized my theme for my tweet archive sub-site, I’ve had a lot of compliments on it. Although I didn’t have any requests to release it, I thought it would be a good idea to develop a “generic” version of the theme without my logo or beaker graphics.

By the way, if you want to see the original tweet archive theme after viewing the live demo of this theme, clear your cookies or click here.

License: The TL Tweets theme is licensed under the GPL, including PHP, HTML, and CSS.

P.S. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter if you don’t already: @themelab

Free Theme Releases

Aug

2010

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23 thoughts on “TL Tweets – Free WordPress Theme”

Eric at August 25, 2010 at 7:52 am said:

Pure awesomeness. Thanks Leland
- Leland at August 26, 2010 at 12:59 pm said:
  
  Thanks Eric, nice to see the tweet archive theme being used in the wild.
Omar at August 25, 2010 at 11:26 am said:

Wouldn’t expect anything less from you Leland!

Great as always!
- Leland at August 26, 2010 at 12:59 pm said:
  
  Thanks Omar, appreciate it.
Darren Nickerson at August 25, 2010 at 2:26 pm said:

Very neat idea, thanks for the info
- Leland at August 26, 2010 at 1:01 pm said:
  
  Thanks Darren, glad you like it.
Calítoe.:. (Cristina MJ) at August 25, 2010 at 5:09 pm said:

I was looking forward to it. Thanks a ton for your generosity. <3
- Leland at August 26, 2010 at 1:01 pm said:
  
  No problem, glad to see some people are getting some use out of this.
  - Calítoe.:. (Cristina MJ) at August 29, 2010 at 10:05 am said:
    
    I managed to set it up. It was quite easy, actually. You can see it here: http://tweets.diletante.net I will try to make it look like my main site: the layout is similar. Thanks again!
Scot at August 26, 2010 at 8:10 am said:

Wondering how to grab the Twitter avatar in the stream as well, or at least embed it adjacent to the username in the title?

Excellent work!
- Leland at August 26, 2010 at 1:00 pm said:
  
  There’s probably a way to pull the Twitter avatar dynamically, although I’d probably just modify the template files (index.php and maybe single.php if you want it on single tweets) and upload the avatar image myself.
James D Kirk at August 26, 2010 at 1:19 pm said:

Just wondering if @Scot was meaning that he wanted to pull each twitter username (twitterer?) avatar into the stream that your theme grabs. If so, guessing their API allows for it considering all the other apps that do it.
Scot at August 26, 2010 at 2:23 pm said:

@leland @james

A number of themes/scripts will pull the twitter avater with the tweet and I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction if you know how to edit the theme to enable this feature. Short of that, I’d like to be able to assign the site user’s twitter avatar adjacent to the site title with some styling. I know you can grab the avatar tied to the email accounts (wp/twitter) but not sure how. I’d like to do this dynamically via the template versus hardcoding so that i can enable it in multisite.

Great theme…
- Leland at August 26, 2010 at 3:07 pm said:
  
  I know Smashing Magazine released a free WordPress plugin called Twittar. Basically it makes it possible to use Twitter avatars instead of Gravatars in comments.
  
  It would probably need to be modified for this specific purpose, but hopefully it’ll lead you in the right direction.
  
  Here’s the link: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/08/twitter-avatars-in-comments-wordpress-plugin/
Jordan at August 26, 2010 at 2:38 pm said:

The only unfortunate thing is Twitter not being able to provide past the last 3200 tweets (from whenever you started backing up.) I was really hoping to be able to archive all tweets *sadface*
- Leland at August 26, 2010 at 3:02 pm said:
  
  Yeah, I had that problem when I was making my own tweet archive. In fact I was only able to archive ~900 or so out of over 6000. It’s definitely best to start backing up as soon as possible so you don’t lose a ton like me.
- Jordan at August 28, 2010 at 8:27 pm said:
  
  Yeah, I wish I stumbled across this services earlier (or rather they were around sooner) so I only have about 60% that I’m missing of mine. I have about 7500 and was able to grab 3200 of ‘em so I suppose some is better than none.
Scot at August 26, 2010 at 7:24 pm said:

@leland

Yeah I’ve been down that rabbit hole but the plugin doesn’t seem to be supported right now. Will keep looking though.

Thx
Jayson Elliot at September 11, 2010 at 3:45 pm said:

This theme works beautifully for me – check it out if you like at http://www.jaysonelliot.com/twitter

I was able to import all of my tweets – about 2,000 of them – using a tool called Twitter Importer:
http://bradt.ca/archives/twitter-importer-for-wordpress/

It uses a little hack in the RSS feed to force Twitter to give up the entire history instead of just a few recent ones.

Once I imported all my tweets (follow instructions at the link above), I installed the “Auto-Hyperlink URLs” plugin by Scott Reilly, which automatically put the links back on all of my tweets.

http://coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/#autohyperlinkurls

I have one question for the author or anyone else – does anyone know how to add pagination to the theme so people can jump quickly through the two hundred or so pages of tweets?
Zoran at September 20, 2010 at 1:00 am said:

Great work! Thank you. I’ve implemented it on my website without problems. It even matches (roughly) my color scheme.
Gabrielle at March 10, 2011 at 10:40 am said:

This is a very cool theme.

The issue I’m having is that it’s pulling in wrong tweets.
I have 2 twitter accounts.

I keep checking all the settings, account info, deleting,
unactivating, reactivating, etc.

I don’t know where the problem lies.
Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Gabrielle

readerswin.abfabgab.com
wp 3.1
Ozh’ Tweet Archiver
Twitter Tools
Gabrielle at March 10, 2011 at 10:59 am said:

ok, I made changes AFTER a digest was posted (which was wrong twitter account) and I kept seeing that digest.

So after re-doing theme, plugins, etc.
doing manually archiving and it’s bringing in the proper account. So I think I’m all set! : )
Jerry Harrell at March 15, 2012 at 4:54 am said:

First I was trying to use Twitter Tools plugin, but it didn’t really work well for me. I’m so glad I found this. Thank you for sharing it with the world!