I love being able to add people’s Twitter feeds to NewsBlur, but I had an idea to improve the functionality. Currently, we can only see the text and any links in the tweet, but it’d be great if we could see things like the previous tweet that somebody is replying to, pictures that people post, or any of the other cards that Twitter has set up.
These all seem like they can be added by embedding the tweets rather than just putting the text into the feed. You can read about it at https://dev.twitter.com/web/embedded-tweets, but it mostly seems to be a blockquote with a bit of custom markup and a JS function that will change the blockquote into an embedded tweet. I’m not sure how that will jive with everything else in NewsBlur, but would make viewing tweets much more convenient.
Newsblur already supports it if the markup is in the correct format
I was just about to start a similar thread. Here’s an example of a twitter feed that gets turned into rich oEmbeds in Newsblur: http://tweezus.dmack.ca/tweets.php?user=dril
I’d love if the built-in Twitter feeds could do this too, so I can shut down my sketchy home-spun solution!
I’m not sure how the Twitter widgets.js code actually works, but it looks like it just needs to have the ‘twitter-tweet’ class and probably the correct formatting.
Between the Twitter embeds and the native Twitter integration in NewsBlur, I prefer the native integration. When feeds embed tweets, then the twitter embeds show up. But it’s not as fast and has to pop in.
I can see why it might be a performance issue if somebody has it set to show all stories and there are like 200 of them, but I have a bunch of feeds that use the “twitter-tweet” class (see the example above) and I haven’t noticed any trouble with it.
The advantage of the embeds is that it shows photos, videos, retweets, etc. more elegantly. Without the “upgraded” embed, a video just shows as a thumbnail image, for example.
