F.A.Q.

Since introducing Twitterfountain, we have received a number of questions regarding the use of Twitterfountain. Below you will find answers to the most common/important ones.

No answer to your question? Contact us!

What settings can I use? Watch this video!

Take four minutes to get comfortable with all the possibilities that Twitterfountain has to offer and create your own optimized version and include it in your site!

Bekijk een video-uitleg in het Nederlands


The Twitterfountain does not show the Tweets that I expect

The Twitterfountain does not log in to Twitter, so it may not show the same Tweets as www.twitter.com does when you are logged in.
Some users protect their tweets, their tweets will not show up in the Twitterfountain.

To check the search results that Twitterfountain will receive, you must log out of twitter in your browser, and then go to http://search.twitter.com/. Type your search keyword there. These are the results that the Twitterfountain should also receive.

The Twitterfountain does not show the Flickr photos that I expect

Twitterfountain does not log in to Flickr, so it may not show photos that you can see from your personal flickr page. Some photos are not public or may not use the correct tags/titles.

To check the search results that the Twitterfountain will receive, first log out of the flickr homepage in your browser. Then type your search keyword in the search box on http://www.flickr.com/. This should display the results that the Twitterfountain receives.

I try to embed Twitterfountain in my WordPress blog, but it does not show up!

If you are using a wordpress.com-blog, we’re very sorry. Because of the security-settings on wordpress.com, our flash-file is stripped from its necessary tags and will not function. More here.

We have contacted the nice folks of WordPress about this issue, and they tell us: “The best recommendation we can make is that you release a plugin or widget that can be used for WordPress.org. If that becomes popular and is requested a lot for inclusion into WordPress.com, then we will consider it.”

So, that’s what we’ll do. As soon as our official plug-in/widget is available, it will turn up here and on the WordPress.org-site. You can find the offical plug-in here. Now you go and take it from there!

The tweets fly by too quickly/too slow

Try adjusting the settings of the Twitterfountain to find a speed that matches your preferences

I cannot read the tweets, the font is too small

Try adjusting the settings of the Twitterfountain to find a font size that matches your preferences

My background image doesn’t load

Check out the errors page to read more about background image errors.

Comment Pages

There are 74 Comments to "F.A.Q."

  • Hi TwitterFountain people,

    Is there a way that you can customize this plugin based on location or language? The header text in the widget is Dutch, which wont’ work for our mostly-US based site. :)

    Thanks!

  • admin says:

    Hi Wendy, that’s as plain and as useful a comment we could expect ;-) Please enter it in our Uservoice Feedback (the tab on the right side of the page) so other users can vote on its priority!

  • Nansepansje says:

    Hi twitterfountain people,

    You did a great job on the twitterfountain. Just one question, is it possible that I can edit somewhere in the code the message scale instead of having to change it every time manually in the options dialogue?

  • admin says:

    Hi Nansjepanse, please submit your request through the UserVoice-tab, so other users can set its priority!

  • Toshi Tsubo says:

    I sent the following some days ago. Will you please acknowledge if you have received my inquiry? Hope you fix the problem in using the Japanese Kanji characters in the Twitterfountain. Thanks. Toshi Tsubo

    Hi, I think the Twitterfountain is very cool!!
    I’m going to use it in my website to pop up my Twitter updates and have tried a test. There’s one problem. I am using the Japanese language in my updates. You know, the Japanese characters consists of “Kana” and “Kanji”, the former of which is Japan origin and the latter of which is china origin. The problem is that all of “Kanji” characters are removed before an update appears on the Twitterfountain screen. I guess that the server that generates the Flash movie doesn’t have the “Kanji” character sets. I hope you support the full set of the Japanese characters very soon. Thanks. Toshi Tsubo

  • Lykle says:

    Hi Toshi, yes, we did respond to your comment. Check out the page with your original comment: http://www.twitterfountain.nl/contact/

  • Stephen says:

    I am getting the twitter tweets through ok, but my Flickr photos aren’t coming through??? any help would be much appreciated.

  • admin says:

    @stephen Are the foto’s in Flickr viewable by all, or restricted? We only show publicly viewable photo’s.

  • jeff says:

    Is it possible to have a twitter fountain that will also accept a basic sms? Thanks

  • admin says:

    @Jeff: unfortunately, no. We’d love to get that working, but it currently is not the highest priority on our list. Please submit your idea to our Uservoice-list, so other people can vote for it too!

  • Stephen says:

    How do I set a static background image. It looks like the option is greyed out

  • admin says:

    @Stephen, you have to type in the url for the background image, we currently do not support cut&paste in that settings window

  • Stephen says:

    I tried to cut and paste the URL of a photo but it doesn’t appear in the background. The background option seems to be greyed out.

  • hardreggaecafe says:

    Hi

    I’m trying to put Japanese tweet on Twitter Fountain.
    But it fail.
    Could you tell me how to fix it?

  • admin says:

    @hardreggaecafe The regular Twitterfountain does not support Kanji, so it will not show Japanese tweets properly. But, if you go over to twitterfountain.jp, we have a twitterfountain that does support Kanji!!!

  • hardreggaecafe says:

    Sorry for late reply.
    I’m so grad to hear that.

    I really appreciate it.

    I’m sure I’ll spread ‘twitter fountain jp’.

    Thank you so much!!

  • infotec says:

    my twitter fountain is only pulling the tweets that were tagged today and yesterday. why aren’t older tagged tweets showing up? they are all tagged with the same hashtag, but only the newest ones are showing up on my fountain.

  • admin says:

    @infotec The Twitterfountain only picks up the latest tweets, we currently do not support a longer history. Please add a request for that feature to our Feedback-tab, or:in our support-forum.

  • hardreggaecafe says:

    Hello

    Concerning ‘Twitterfountain.jp’, it doesn’t work Image’s ‘search keyword’ in settings.

    I entered Flicker’s keyword, yet twitterfountain didn’t pick up photo by the keywords.

    Could you look into this matter?

    Thanks

  • admin says:

    @hardreggaecafe What search keyword did you use? Are the photo’s you are trying to display publicly visible in flickr?

  • aly says:

    twitterfountain is one of my favorite things on the internet! I love you guys!

    If I go to a site running twitterfountain and post the url of our background image, it works fine. However when I have pasted our background URL into the html code into our wordpress site, everything works except for the background image which does not show up.

    Any ideas?
    Aly

  • admin says:

    @Aly Have you tried adding the url to the fountain on our site, and then copy/pasting the embed-code into your site? If that fails, please submit the bug to our support page: support.twitterfountain.com

  • hardreggaecafe says:

    Sorry for late reply.

    I used the search by flickr.
    Suppose I search ‘test’ on flickr, I try to set twitter fountain’s config, Image’s ’search keyword’.
    These are not same result. Twitter fountain picks up different images from Flickr search.

    Could you check it up?

    Thank you.

  • Barbera says:

    Hi,

    It seems that there is a limit of 5 pictures in the background, is that correct? And another question; how long will a tweet be seen on the fountain (since you say you have no history).
    Thx!
    Barbera

  • Eerk says:

    You can check the result by going to flickr or picasa (without being logged in!) and then searching with the same keyword you use in the twitterfountain. If you find more than 5 pics, they should also show up in Twitterfountain.
    Your other question: the twitter search result gets refreshed at least every minute. Only the 20 most recent tweets will show up. We’re working on getting the most recent tweets a bit more varied, for example by showing the 50 most recent tweets.

  • jonathan says:

    Hi love twitter fountain but I have one small issue. The background image works fine when I am creating my settings but if I save the code to my site the background doesn’t show

  • admin says:

    @Jonathan thanks for your comment. Please post your bug via the feedback-tab and we’ll try to find a resolution as soon as possible.

  • Ivy says:

    Hey there!
    Thanks for Twitter Fountain – it’s awesome!
    I was wondering is there some way to filter background pictures? I’m creating a Twitter Fountain to be at the background of a presentation – a live-feed type of thing and I’d like for inappropriate pics named “chicag” to not pop up but I seem to not have control over that. Or is there an option where the pics come from a preselected source? In addition, the only option that plays pics in their real size is STACK, while in Slideshow they are fit to screen which impairs their quality. Is there a way to specify that I’d like only pic above a certain size to be shown?
    Sorry for all the questions but thanks in advance!

  • admin says:

    @Ivy Thanks for the feedback and the cheers! What you request, we cannot offer at this time. However, we did notice the need for this functionality, and are working on a new release that will allow you to specify a set of pictures to be used as background pictures. You will have to wait a bit longer, however…

  • Angela says:

    Why does bij tweet not show up in my twitterfountain?
    My tag is #be040 but it doesn’t show up when I use it….
    Do I first make a fountain and then tweet or first tweet and then create a fountain?

  • Angela says:

    Now my older tweets show up but it doesn’t seem te refresh?
    It should refresh every one minute but my new tweets do nog appear. Why is that?

  • admin says:

    @Angela sometimes, all it takes is a bit of patience. Remember that we rely on Twitter to publish your tweet, and find it. Secondly: there is no specific order in which to work, but the Twitterfountain can only show tweets that already exist.

  • admin says:

    @Angela This is something that we need to fix. The time it takes for the animations to complete is longer than the refresh-time of one minute. Therefor, it will not always show you the latest tweets. Try increasing the refresh time (make it longer), that feels counter-intuitive, but might solve your problem.

  • Martijn says:

    Hello, I have a question. Is it posible to use twitterfountain with more then 1 hashtag? if so how should i enter them?

  • admin says:

    @martijn Yes, just separate them with comma’s

  • Martijn says:

    Hi again,
    I use flickr to generate the background images, but the images in the fountain are of bad qualilty. I use the code in a html document stored on my server. is there anything i can change in the script to improve the image quality? is there a list of possible script-options?

  • Bart says:

    Hi guys. Great tool you have!!

    One question. The twitterfountain gives only tweets in English. How can I change this so I can see also my Dutch tweets?

  • admin says:

    You cannot change that, because there is no such option. TF should show you any tweet that contains the tags you set in the options. This must be an accident/freak situation.

  • Bart says:

    the strange thing is that really only english tags are shown. Maybe you can try my name @bartblikman, you will see only a couple of english tweets.

  • Martijn 2 says:

    Almost the same as the previous Martijn: using Flickr for background images. Sometimes bad quality, but more importantly: twitterfountain only picks from the most recent uploaded pictures on Flickr. Only 6 or 7 pictures. Is that the way it’s supposed to work or is it a common problem? And can it be fixed?

    Other remark, please fix that your comment doens’t get deleted when you filled in a wrong emailadress.

  • Gooiseridder says:

    Hoe kun je contact maken met andere twitteraars en reageren of het beeld even stilzetten?

  • @Martijn 2: I guess the Flickr problem you are experiencing is related to the refresh rate of the search engine at the moment. TF frequently refreshes its data by doing a new search and then removes the old data. We are looking into this and are trying to come up with the best way to add only the newest info while keeping the previous results.

    Regarding the quality of the images, I will ask Erik K if he has any ideas on that as this is more his area.

  • admin says:

    @Gooiseridder Helaas heeft Twitterfountain op dit moment geen pauze-knop. We zijn wél bezig met het aanklikbaar maken van tweets, zodat je er op zou kunnen gaan reageren. Dit komt binnenkort beschikbaar.

  • qurius CZ says:

    I would like to know the name of the property in javascript: (“show the twitpic images”). If I generate share address there is not this property.
    thanks

  • admin says:

    @quriuz, if you want to not show any pictures in the Twitterfountain, you can just delete the keyword in the images-tab in the settings. In the fountain-tab, you can also add a url to your own background-image, if you like.

  • @qurius CZ: The param for showing images is fv_imagesource. Values can be 0 for no images, 1 for images from Flickr, 2 for images from Picasa and 3 for images from both Flickr and Picasa. Good luck!

  • Abe says:

    Kan het kloppen dat op dit moment de images niet worden geladen? Zowel bij Flickr als bij Picassa? Wat doe ik fout? Heb me aan bovenstaande gehouden, maar toch krijg ik het niet voor elkaar!

  • admin says:

    @Abe er lijkt een glitch in Twitterfountain te zitten op dit moment. We proberen het zsm op te lossen.

  • Kyle says:

    if i want to set a static, custom designed background image, what are the best dimensions to design it in?

  • eerk says:

    The best dimension for a background image is the size of the screen you will display it on, for example 1024×768 pixels.
    The image will always be scaled so it’s best not to use a very small image. (for example, 400×300 would be too small)

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