For embedded tweets, rather than using Twitter's embed function (which comes with all sorts of JavaScript and tracking and slowness), I render tweets as static HTML. This is an idea I originally got from Dr. Drang.
To embed a tweet in a post, I use the following tag:
{% tweet https://twitter.com/iamkimiam/status/848188958567800832 %}
When the site is built, I have a personal plugin that:
- Polls the Twitter API
- Caches the complete API response and a copy of the author's avatar
- Uses the cached API response and a template to render an HTML snippet
Polling the Twitter API requires a set of API tokens, but I check in the cached responses (see _tweets).
This means that I can fetch the tweet data on a local machine, but when I push to CI, it doesn't need my credentials to render the tweet.
Because I render the tweets at compile time, I can change the appearance of old tweets by updating the template, without having to edit old posts. That's part of why I keep the entire API response – in case I later need data I'd thrown away the first time.