Follow Me on Twitter CTA on Ghost and Wordpress
The other day I read a post on Hacker News about premature optimization in web application development. This was an excellent post in its own right, but one thing that jumped out at me was the call to action from the author to follow him on Twitter at the end of his post. I liked that it was subtle, simple, and effective (I followed him on Twitter). Naturally, I stole this idea for my own blogs. This method uses the Follow Button provided by Twitter. In this post, I will show you how to add your own “Follow Me on Twitter” Call to Action on your own Wordpress or Ghost blog.
Wordpress
I used the Bottom of Every Post Wordpress Plugin because I found that hacking the main wordpress loop caused my CTA to show up at the very bottom of a page rather than at the end of the post content. In addition, I made a small change to this plugin to make sure that it only appears on single posts rather than on the home page. Edit bottom-of-every-post/bottom_of_every_post.php from the Wordpress Plugins Editor and update the method to be:if( is_single() && file_exists( $fileName )){/* open the text file and read its contents */
$theFile = fopen( $fileName, “r”); $msg = fread( $theFile, filesize( $fileName )); fclose( $theFile );
/* detect the old message in code to try and eradicate my name and # showing up on strange websites that are run by lazy people */
if( $msg == “<p>Call for an estimate 724-498-1551<br><a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a></p>” ){ $msg = “<p>Thank you for installing the Bottom of every post WordPress plugin. To find out how to change or remove this message, read <a href="https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bottom-of-every-post/installation/">the instructions</a>.</p>”; }
/* append the text file contents to the end of
the_content*/ return $content . stripslashes( $msg ); } else{/* if
the_contentbelongs to a page or our file is missing the result of this filter is no change tothe_content*/return $content; }
is_single()
<p> If you made it this far, you should probably follow me on twitter. :) <a class="twitter-follow-button" href="https://twitter.com/levlaz"> Follow @levlaz</a> </p><script>window.twttr = (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0], t = window.twttr || {}; if (d.getElementById(id)) return t; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = “https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
t._e = []; t.ready = function(f) { t._e.push(f); };
return t; }(document, “script”, “twitter-wjs”));</script>
I used ghosts code-injection tool to get this to work for every page. I added the following two scripts to the Blog Footer.
<script> article = document.getElementsByClassName('post-content'); child = document.createElement('p'); cta = '<p class="follow"> If you read this far, thank you! Follow me on Twitter to stay up to date on what the fuss is all about.<br />'; link = '<a class="twitter-follow-button" href="https://twitter.com/tralevnet"> Follow @tralevnet</a></p>' child.innerHTML = cta + link; article[0].appendChild(child); </script><script> window.twttr = (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0], t = window.twttr || {}; if (d.getElementById(id)) return t; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = “https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
t._e = []; t.ready = function(f) { t._e.push(f); };
return t; }(document, “script”, “twitter-wjs”)); </script>
<style> .follow { line-height: 1.5; width: 50%; padding: 15px; border: dashed 1px lightgrey; font-size: smaller; color: #555; font-family: sans-serif; font-weight: bold; }.twitter-follow-button { margin-top: 10px; } </style>
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- Lev Lazinskiy
- Lev Lazinskiy
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Lev Lazinskiy
- Terminal RSS Reader With Nom
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The logical destination of LLMs from Andy Bell
- Revised rules of engineering leadership. from Irrational Exuberance
- The circus freaks of open source from Drew DeVault's blog
- Clanker: A Word For The Machine from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- I ran a half-marathon! from gluecko.se
- My Running Tips from Kevin Bell's Blog
- tweet from Derek Sivers blog
- My life was changed by four sentences in four books from Derek Sivers blog
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Veganism and Moral Intuitions
Inspecting some ethical claims, in the hope you might revisit some of your own intuitions
via The Map is Mostly Water June 24, 2026Adversarial Communication
“AI” turns every conversation into a fight, because fighting is what they are good at.
via Deciphering Glyph June 23, 2026The MacCharlie Method
I keep thinking about MacCharlie, this strange product from 1985 that turned the original Macintosh into a dual-purpose machine that could also run software by its chief competitor, early PCs: I’m fascinated by it because it almost feels like cargo culting...
via Unsung June 23, 2026Generated by openring