Have you ever posted a message on Twitter asking for responses to a blog post you’d written? Frustrated that you can’t get those replies on your blog without doing multiple screenshots? Chirrup, a Twitter comment system, may be just what you are looking for.
Twitter Comments for Your Website
Chirrup is a really simple Twitter comments solution. If you’re familiar with the FriendFeed plugin for WordPress, Chirrup won’t be a problem at all. It’s essentially a separate component to add to your blog, similar to a widget. The system “Chirrup fetches all of the replies from Twitter, and sorts them by URL so you can have a comment feed for each page in your site.” You can place the comment box anywhere you’d like and style it to your tastes. Users can even send a Twitter comment through system.
How It Works
To run Chirrup you will need the following:
- A little space with a hosting provider who support PHP (i.e. nearly any hosting provider).
- N.B. Your host must support curl, which means completely vanilla PHP installations may not work. Any hosting provider worth it’s salt will have this enabled by default, however.
- The ability to add a piece of Javascript to your site’s HTML templates.
It seems it doesn’t need anything that hosting doesn’t already come with. Though Chirrup store comments as they arrive from Twitter, it also uses a small XML file on your server to prevent relying on the database.
“1. Follow your web host’s instructions for uploading files, and put Chirrup wherever you want it to go. Chirrup will run either from a dedicated subdomain or from a sub-folder within an existing site. Note down the URL where Chirrup’s folder will be accessible – we’ll use http://chirrup.example.com/ in this example.
2. If you are using Apache, Chirrup already contains a .htaccess file which will forbid visitors from peeking at Chirrup’s XML cache. If you’re using a web server other than Apache, you’ll need to configure this yourself.”
With some small lines of javascript placed where ever you’d prefer, you’re all set to use Chirrup. To use Chirrup on a WordPress blog simply download the contents of Chirrup and upload them to your WordPress plugins directory in their own folder. Piece of cake.
A Solution to Conversation Fragmentation
The system is very simple and easy and also a great solution to the conversation fragmentation nature of services like Twitter. So if you’ve been pretty heated about not getting those comments back on your blog, Chirrup is the best solution out there to bring Twitter replies back to the originating source.
