Twitter Cards: I Fold..?

It's been two weeks since I set about teaching myself how to implement Twitter Cards in my Blogger site. I have my reasons. First, I wanted to give my tweets a little "extra" when posting links to my blog. Also, I thought it would be a nice addition to my collective skills.

THE LATEST

Let me begin my update by saying my decision to go with a Blogger site is hindering my ability to accomplish this goal. Not that it's not possible to add Twitter Cards to a Blogger site...it just requires some steps that I haven't been able to clearly understand. I haven't looked into whether or not it's easier to add Twitter Cards to a Wordpress, Weebly or other blogs. Prior to this blog, I had a Wordpress.org site and chose Bluehost to be the host. Even though it wasn't costing a great deal of money, I couldn’t justify spending any money to keep the site running based on the low number of views I was receiving.

I gave up my personal web domain and moved over to Blogger because I'm on #TeamGoogle, as I've admitted before. It's easy to tweak the layout and customize the theme and if it's good enough for the official Google and Motorola blogs, it's good enough for me.

MY FIRST STEPS

OK, back on track. When I set out to accomplish my goal, I was excited to see many examples of other Blogger users wanting to add Twitter Cards to their sites. Even more, many of these people shared examples of the HTML code they applied to their blog (along with instructions) that helped with their issue. Not all of the codes are the same and not all of the examples call for the codes to be placed in the same spot. I tried several variations of the code in various spots but I never found that ideal, full solution for which I was searching.

Surprisingly, the extremely grainy video that I linked to in my previous post is really the only video I came across that even remotely touched on the subject. Equally surprising, many of the forum posts and articles that I found to be helpful were fairly dated - many being 2 to 3 years old. Which made me wonder...

CAN IT BE DONE?

Twitter features a lot of helpful information about the different types of Twitter Cards on its developer blog and they provide access to a convenient tool that allows you to test the URL of sites on which you implemented Twitter Cards. I struggled to see the results I wanted to see with this validator though. I had enough failed attempts to make me wonder if Twitter no longer allows us Blogger users to enjoy this feature.

Nay -  I'm sure it can be done and I'm not stopping. I know that I could benefit from devoting more time to this project but I've been busy over the past few weeks and I don't foresee my schedule slowing down. I think I might just go FULL GOOGLE FANBOY and scout for help in the Google+ Blogger Community! Of course, I'll still appreciate any assistance you could send my way in the comments.

Thanks for reading and thanks for your help!

UPDATE: The final part of this series can be read here.