Twitter Updates With Custom Bullets

I received a private message on the K2 Support Forum asking how I did my Twitter Updates with a Twitter icon (example). Because others might be interested, here’s how I did it:

• Download and install Twitter Tools in your plugins folder.
• Go to Manage > Categories and create a category to be used only by these Twitter Updates posts. I created a category called “Tweets.”
• Go to Options > Twitter Tools and configure Twitter Tools to create a daily digest post from your tweets. Twitter Tools will post the previous day’s tweets as an unordered list.
• Continue to configure Twitter Tools by selecting the category you created for the daily digest. Twitter Tools will apply this category to your daily digest posts.
• Grab the Twitter icon. I just did a screen capture and cropped it down to about 16×16 pixels. I saved it as twitterlogo.gif.
• Upload the icon to your site. I use a custom CSS file and have an “images” folder.
• Edit your CSS file to use the twitter icon as a custom list marker. Use the category in the CSS selector so it applies only to these Twitter Update posts.

The CSS code I use is:

.category-tweets li {
	list-style-image:url(images/twitterlogo.gif);
}

My implementation is not perfect. Twitter Tools seems to create its summary based on GMT instead of your time zone. If you live in western Europe, you’ll have no problem with this. Here in western U.S., my tweets after around 4pm go to the following day’s digest.

Also, the icon appears to be shifted up with respect to the text. Unlike background images, you cannot position custom list markers with pixel offsets. I should probably recapture the logo and leave a little more white space above it.

Good luck!

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