Using the XML Web Part to show your Twitter feed in SharePoint

I have put together a quick and dirty example of using the XML Web Part to display and style your Twitter RSS feed in a SharePoint page. 100% of the work is done in XSLT, all you have to do is:

• Add an XML Web Part to your page:

 

 

• Then for the XML Link add the RSS feed for your Twitter updates, the link for this can be found on the bottom right of your Twitter home page:

 

• Just right click on the RSS feed and copy and paste the the URL into the XSL Link field of the XML Web Part. (mine is http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/15901109.rss)

 

• Next, click the XSL Editor button and paste in the following XSLT code:

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet
     version="1.0"
     xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
     <xsl:output method="html" />
     <xsl:template match="rss/channel">
        <style type="text/css">
            .twit_tweet a {
                font-size: 13px;
                color: #111111;
                width: 400px;
            }
            .twit_date {
                font-size: 12px;
                color: #333333;
                font-style: italic;
            }
            .twit_holder {
                padding-bottom: 15px;
                width: 500px;
            }
        </style>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="item" />
     </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="item">
        <div class="twit_holder">
            <div class="twit_tweet"><a target="_blank" href="{link}"><xsl:value-of select="description" disable-output-escaping="yes"/></a></div>
            <div class="twit_date"><xsl:value-of select="substring-before(pubDate,' +0000')" /></div>
        </div>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

• After you click OK and Apply your changes you should see your tweets styled in the XML Web Part:

 

• You can adjust the CSS in the XSLT to change the way the tweets look. Also, if this blows up your site, don’t say I didn’t warn you. I haven’t really tested it in production. Have fun!