This morning, Steve Rubel noted that John Edwards was one of his followers on Twitter. Sure enough, Sen. Edwards has over 500 friends and followers on Twitter and he’s also following me. I figured it was time to get a little more involved with Twitter.

I’ve been using Twitter since last October. I like being able to update my status via a text message from my cellphone. You can also update your Facebook status from your cellphone. With Facebook, your text message needs to start off with ‘I am’, so Facebook can distinguish the message from other commands. Typically, I write my message, starting off with “I am” and then send it to both Facebook atn Twitter at the same time.

I started thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to have a twitter widget that would show your most recent status on another site. Twitter does have an RSS feed. I’ve claimed my Twitter micro-blog over on Technorati, again, following Steve’s example. It then occurred to me that using the aggregator module from Drupal, I could add a Twitter block to this site.

First, I added the feed to the aggregator. Then, I turned on the block that it creates. About a quarter of the way down the left hand side of the screen, you can see ‘Twitter Feed’. I went to configure the block, but found that the aggregator module lets you select a number between 2 and twenty for the number of items to display in the block.

Checking the code, I found that the value to change was the block column in the aggregator_feed table. Looking at the More link in the block, I found that my feed id, fid was 3, so I updated my table with aggregator_feed table with

update aggregator_feed set block = 1 where fid = 3;

Now, the feed shows my most recent status on Twitter. One could use other tools to take an RSS feed and change it to a widget, but fortunately, the aggregator module in Drupal does what I want. Ideally, Twitter might make this available as a widget, and people could add their status to their sites in other places, like their headers.

So, with a text message to Twitter and Facebook, I can update Twitter, Facebook and Orient Lodge.