If you ask me, those little rectangular chicklets that people use to display their twitter followers and their Feedburner subscribers are getting old. Just look around. Every blog in the universe seems to have one.

Every blog…except this one.

If you check out the top right corner of each page you’ll see my twitter followers displayed as text updated every hour. It actually took me a while to find a good explanation as to how to get this done.

If you want to do something similar on your site this article is your step-by-step guide to getting it done.

There are really only two fairly simple steps required to add this to your site. In the first step you will be pasting the code into your site that will do all the hard work. That code will work to contact twitter once per hour and request the number of followers on your account. It will then store that number in a variable that can easily be displayed anywhere in your template.

In the second step we are going to place that variable in the theme so that it can display our count.

Take note that this process is designed specifically for WordPress websites.

Modify your theme’s functions.php file

For this first step you’ll need to browse through your site’s files to locate your theme’s functions.php file. When you open it scroll all the way to the bottom and locate the final line of code. It will look something like this:

?>

Once you have located that piece of code you will need to create a blank line above it and paste the following code onto it:

function string_getInsertedString($long_string,$short_string,$is_html=false){

if($short_string>=strlen($long_string))return false;
$insertion_length=strlen($long_string)-strlen($short_string);
for($i=0;$i<strlen ($short_string);++$i){
if($long_string[$i]!=$short_string[$i])break;
}

$inserted_string=substr($long_string,$i,$insertion_length);
if($is_html && $inserted_string[$insertion_length-1]=='<'){
$inserted_string='<'.substr($inserted_string,0,$insertion_length-1);
}

return $inserted_string;
}

function DOMElement_getOuterHTML($document,$element){
$html=$document->saveHTML();
$element->parentNode->removeChild($element);
$html2=$document->saveHTML();
return string_getInsertedString($html,$html2,true);
}

function getFollowers($username){
$x = file_get_contents("http://twitter.com/sitesketch101");
$doc = new DomDocument;
@$doc->loadHTML($x);
$ele = $doc->getElementById('follower_count');
$innerHTML=preg_replace('/^< [^>]*>(.*)< [^>]*>$/',"\1",DOMElement_getOuterHTML($doc,$ele));
return $innerHTML;
}

Be sure to locate my twitter username, sitesketch101, and replace it with your own. I’ve made it bold in the code so you can clearly see where it is.

I know that all of this code probably looks intimidating but it’s only a copy-and-paste function so it should be fairly simple.

Insert the twitter count into your theme

Next open your theme’s header.php file and paste in the following code wherever you want to display the text:

<?php echo getFollowers("instantshift")." Followers"; ?>

You can replace or modify the word ‘Followers’ with the label of your choice but be very careful not to change any of the quotation marks, semi-colons or anything else. Only change the letters to reflect your desired label.

That’s all there is to it. I hope you don’t have any trouble putting this to work on your site. Happy blogging.