Twitter for the Hydrographic Academy

Just a quick update and to mention I finalised the creation of the Hydrographic Academy Twitter account. This with a view of increasing awareness of the Academy. I see this as an addition to the HA blog I created last year. I went for the same background I created for the blog to maintain consistency, it was a bit of cropping and tweaking as Twitter is particular with its background graphics (equally, graphic files should not be too large as people use this on their mobile devices - predominately).  @HydroAcademy was chosen as the tag name to keep things simple. The Twitter account also points back to the University Extranet pages as this is a third party product I think it is important that we demonstrate the true origin of the Academy. 


Twitter from my own experiences, if used properly, is a good microblogging tool.  It has potential to work well at conferences and similar events in that it reaches out to a wider audience, not just the members attending, but those outside.  It is also a great way to keep the Plymouth University community (who have their own twitter account) up to date on what we have been doing.  The team is looking forward to using this when we visit Oceanology International 2012 in London this March. 


If you're interested in Marine/hydrographic studies feel free to follow us!

How to get a Twitter widget (feed) into Sharepoint 2010

I had a recent request from an academic wishing to get a Twitter feed into SharePoint 2010. Easy? Well not as easy as you would think. Discovering that the script functionality is turned of in Telerik RadEditor for MOSS SharePoint web part. Why? Telerik actually strips Javascript but there is a work around. Sadly, this did not work for me, I suspect even with AllowScripts="true" function, it would still need additional adjustments at administrator level, but I did not have the necessary access.

However I did try this and it worked! - Use the 'Content Editor' web part:

• Go to the Twitter resource to create a widget (you need a Twitter account).
• Copy the JavaScript code provided by Twitter into notepad and save as a .txt document (as shown in the shared documents area in my screenshot) Please note the numbering on the multi-screenshot patchwork above:

1. Right click and copy the URL of this uploaded text file (probably best to ensure this file is ‘read only’ for students! Or hidden).
2. Select ‘edit page’ for SharePoint (top left - activated for editing in this example)
3. Select any ‘Add a Web part’ area (probably right is best? its personal preference)
4. Find and add the web part ‘Content Editor’.
5. Select 'edit web part' then paste the URL link for the txt file from the documents area to the ‘Content Link’ area of the web part (shown top right).
6. Apply and ok.
7. It now appears in SharePoint as an active Twitter widget/feed.

Know issues are: running script in IE (in general), the user will be asked if it’s safe to run active content – this does not usually happen in other browsers. Annoying but I think most users are used to this now.

Worth a look: There are several flavours to the Twitter widget feeds, including the ability to use a keyword search, opening up other opportunities.

Thank you to Mark Pannell and Elena Menendez-Alonso for some excellent suggestions to help make this happen.