I was using the Twitter Widget for the longest time but I was looking to step it up a level and add additional styling and filtering. Recently I got started with the Rails Twitter Gem and so far so good, but I wanted to be able to link back to profiles wherever @username appears.
Looking around it seems that Twitter Anywhere is the way to go, but I was wondering if there was a better implementation in a Rails environment? Perhaps a gem that loads the required JS files and provides helper methods?
Also I should note that I don't necessarily require all of the functionality that the anywhere api offers, at the moment my main focus is just to provide the @username links (though it is certainly nice to have the option for future expansion).
It turns out that Twitter Anywhere might have been a little overkill for what I was trying to do. All I really needed was the following helper method as mentioned here
def linkup_mentions_and_hashtags(text)
text.gsub!(/@([\w]+)(\W)?/, '<a href="http://twitter.com/\1">@\1</a>\2')
text.gsub!(/#([\w]+)(\W)?/, '<a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23\1">#\1</a>\2')
text
end