There are a lot of Twitter feed plugins for WordPress out there but all of them have something in common, they fail to load the tweets when Twitter is overcapacity and that happens quite often.

I was having this problem with a customer and he wanted it fixed so I was thinking to myself how I am supposed to fix the Twitter Overcapacity problem? That stupid Fail Whale is not something I can control.

I kept trying different WordPress plugins but they all have the same problem, so I decided to a little research about the Twitter Goodies, after all if it is the Twitter Goodies it should not fail that much, at least that what I thought.

I ended up using the Twitter Goodies to load the feeds to the WordPress theme because it does not fail when there are Twitter Overcapacity issues, but then I faced another problem: It is not that easy to style the Widget to match custom designs. But there is also a way you can tweak the CSS to match your original design.

This is how the complete process works:

1. Go to the Twitter Goodies page: http://twitter.com/goodies/
2. Select Widgets.
3. Click on My Website.
4. Click on Profile Widgets.
5. Customize the widget: In this step you need to configure all the widget settings, like the number of tweets to display, colors, etc.
6. Click on “Finish and Grab Code”.
7. Paste that code wherever you want the twitter feed to be located in your theme.
8. You are going to get something like this: Screenshot1 goes here.

You will probably want to hide the top and bottom bars so that the feed matches your original design, it is really easy to do:
1. The script is going to output an HTML code so all you have to do is hide the top and bottom bars with css.
2. The code will be something like this:
.twtr-hd {
display:none !important;
}
.twtr-ft {
display:none !important;
}
3. You can also change some colors with CSS.

That’s it, you can now have a functional Twitter Feed that matches your design.