There’s a little gem that was shipped in Confluence 3.1 which makes monitoring your multiple Twitter accounts, and tweets about your company, a breeze.
What is it?
An incredibly useful macro that often goes unnoticed is the Widget Macro. In short, it allows you to embed multi-media content from other web sites into your Confluence page. It supports a bunch of different web services, including Twitter.
Where can I find it?
1. Select ‘Widget’ from the ‘Insert Menu’ in the Rich Text Editor (requires Confluence 3.1+)
2. Select ‘Widget Connector’ from the ‘Macro Browser’ (requires Confluence 3.0+)
How can I use it?
1. View Multiple Twitter Accounts
I display the tweets from both of my twitter accounts on my personal space homepage. All you need to do is enter the URL for your Twitter handle into the URL field in the Macro Browser. For my @ConfluenceGuru account, the resulting wiki markup is:
{widget:url=http://twitter.com/ConfluenceGuru}
2. Monitor Twitter Mentions
There is a lot of talk about Atlassian and its tools on Twitter. Those of us in the Product Marketing team make a conscious effort to monitor mentions of the company and our respective products and contact customers who may need some help or who have some insightful feedback for us. With the Widget Macro that was shipped in 3.1 you can now display the results of a Twitter search on a Confluence page. I have a page setup which displays mentions of Atlassian and all of our tools. Again, all you need to enter is the URL of your Twitter search into the URL field in the Macro Broswer. In the case of searching for mentions of Atlassian, the resulting wiki markup would be:
{widget:url=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=atlassian}
Try it for yourself!
Jump into the Confluence sandbox and try it out. Be sure to follow @ConfluenceGuru if you’d like more hints and tips about using Confluence.
