Add the Commun.it Widget to Your Free WordPress Blog

The folks at Commun.it have come out with a great widget to help promote you and and your followers on your web properties. They even include the sample code you can use to drop into your website to get an instant Commun.it widget. The problem is that if you add a text widget to your WordPress blog and drop in the code the IFRAME tag gets stripped by WordPress and the Widget will not work.

I e-mailed Commun.it about the problem and have been having a bit of a back and forth with the co-founder of Commun.it Mike Polischuk (Twitter: @MikePolis) and I manged to pull together a bit of a work around for things. This solution is far from ideal but it gets the job done and will make your blog look a lot better.

What follows is a list of instructions to add the Commun.it widget to your free WordPress blog. I am going to assume a bit of a familiarity here with WordPress and basic image editing.

1. If you are not already on Commun.it then Sign up for Free
2. Go here to generate your Widget
3. Do a screen capture of the Window
4. Bring your screen capture into an image editor and crop out the image of just the Commun.it widget and save it to a file
5. Using the Add New Media feature of WordPress, add the image of your Commun.it widget to WordPress
6. When you add the New Media, copy the WordPress image URL some place safe for future reference. I will refer to it as WIDGETIMG
7. Go here to invite friends. In the Invite Friends from Twitter textbox cut and paste the http link (it should look like http://commun.it/?t=4d469c) some place safe. I will refer to is as COMMUNITLINK
8. Open the Widget Editor in WordPress and add a Text Widget to your blog
9. Give the Text Widget a title. I suggest Commun.it
10. Add the following to the body:

    <A HREF=”COMMUNITLINK” target=”_blank”>
    <IMG SRC=”WIDGETIMG” border=”0″>
    </A>

    Where: COMMUNITLINK is the Commun.it Invite Friends Link and WIDGETLINK is the WordPress image link to your Commun.it widget image

11. Save the Text widget and now go look at your blog.
12. If you find the Widget image is too large for your blog then simply resize the Commun.it widget in your image editor, upload it again and change the IMG SRC to point to your new Widget image in WordPress.

The one downside to this approach is that your image will never update to reflect your current Twitter status so you may at some point in the future want to do this again to get updated information. The upside is the moment somebody clicks on the image then they will get referred to Commun.it with your Commun.it id as the person that sent them there.

Thanks again to Mike Polischuk at Commun.it for all his help and a great product.