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_content
belongs 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
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Future Fonts from Blog – Brad Frost
- 21st Century C++ from Communications of the ACM
- Submarines DevCon 2025 Keynote Speech from JoshHaines.com
- How I Use AI: Meet My Promptly Hired Model Intern from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- DeepSeek from Maggie Appleton
- Digital Reality Digital Shock from Christopher Butler
- 10 habits to help becoming a Debian Maintainer from Optimized by Otto
- Tiny corners from Manuel Moreale RSS Feed
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
MusicBrainz Picard identifies songs from *.mp3 files and automatically fixes metadata
In my first attempt to switch from streaming to move back to listening to *.mp3 files, one of the issues I encountered was organization: how to standardize the metadata of the songs? The solution I was familiar with at the time — manually editing each son…
via Manual do Usuário April 24, 2025Google's control of the web could be coming to an end
It's been hard to avoid the US government's antitrust case against Meta lately, since CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent three days in front of the cameras in Congress, testifying about his company's alleged anti-competitive tactics. But another equall…
via The Torment Nexus April 24, 2025$5 million in tokens stolen from ZKsync
An attacker compromised an admin account belonging to the ZKsync Ethereum layer-2 project, which is built by Matter Labs. By doing so, they were able to steal approximately $5 million worth of the ZK token, which the project said wer…
via Web3 is Going Just Great April 24, 2025Generated by openring