Suggested Tweet Plugin for Jekyll

It’s always a really nice feeling when one sees one’s posts shared with others, usually via blog post or Tweet. In the spirit of encouraging more of this, I present to you the Suggested Tweet plugin for Jekyll. With this plugin, visitors to your site need no longer grope for words while they attempt to share your content!

About the Plugin

The Suggested Tweet plugin is a custom Liquid Tag for Jekyll that allows for the embedding of suggested tweets via Twitter’s Web Intents API. It makes liberal use of Rich Hollis’s Twitter Web Intents Ruby Gem and was lovingly made by John Colvin and me.

Installation

1. Copy suggested-tweet.rb into your site’s _plugins directory
2. Install twitter_web_intents gem, either manually or via Bundler
3. Add desired parameters to _config.yml
4. Add desired parameters to YAML front-matter of page
5. Add {% suggested_tweet %} tag to your post or template.

Configuration

The following parameters may be set globally in _config.yml or on a per page basis in the YAML front-matter. Parameters set in the YAML front-matter take precedence over those set in _config.yml. Note that all parameters are optional, although be sure to set at least one!

suggested_tweet:
  url:                  'http://davidensinger.com/'
  via:                  'davidensinger'
  text:                 'Hello world'
  in_reply_to:          331434728957833218
  hashtags:             ['Jekyll', 'Twitter']
  related:              ['davidensinger', 'richhollis', '2john4tv']

Usage

Put the custom Liquid tag anywhere you want, whether that be within a post, layout, or include:

{% suggested_tweet %}

Output

The tag renders as a properly encoded URL:

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?hashtags=Jekyll,Twitter&in_reply_to=331434728957833218&related=davidensinger,richhollis,2john4tv&text=Hello+world&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdavidensinger.com&via=davidensinger

Liquid Output for Parameters

Any (and all) of the parameters may be used together with the Suggested Tweet tag. These may be helpful if decide to include the tag outside of a post and in a template:

• _config.yml: {{ site.suggested_tweet.text }}
• YAML front matter: {{ page.suggested_tweet.text }}

A Practical Example

The following block of code can be found in the footer of my posts template. You’ll see that I only print out the text and hashtags parameters, even though all six variables are available to me. This is due to parameters not displaying to my liking (url and via) or not displaying at all (in_reply_to and related) and for styling purposes as well.

{% if page.suggested_tweet %}
  <div class="entry-meta-suggested-tweet">
    <h3 class="suggested-tweet-title">Spread the Word</h3>
    <a href="{% suggested_tweet %}" class="suggested-tweet-bubble">
      {% if page.suggested_tweet.text != empty %}
        <span class="suggested-tweet-text">{{ page.suggested_tweet.text }}</span>
      {% endif %}
      {% if page.suggested_tweet.hashtags != empty %}
        {% for hashtag in page.suggested_tweet.hashtags %}
          <span class="suggested-tweet-hashtag">#{{ hashtag }}</span>
        {% endfor %}
      {% endif %}
    </a>
    <p class="suggested-tweet-link"><a href="{% suggested_tweet %}" class="icon-left icon-twitter">Click to Tweet</a> <small>(you may edit before posting.)</small></p>
  </div>
{% endif %}

Roadmap

• Add an option to allow for parameters to be combined if 1) they’ve been set in both _config.yml and YAML front-matter of a page and 2) they accept multiple values, such as hashtags and related
• Allow for parameters to be set within the tag itself, but without using a regular expression to do so. Possible? Yay or nay?