Many people will use Twitter counter badge from TwitterCounter.com to show twitter count in their website or blog, but twitter counter badges from TwitterCounter.com didn’t come with color personalization, sometimes it can’t match the color of the theme, so I don’t like to use it.

If you want to display Twitter count in plain text, you can follow the below steps.

1. Add the following code to functions.php.

function string_getInsertedString($long_string,$short_string,$is_html=false){
  if($short_string>=strlen($long_string))return false;
  $insertion_length=strlen($long_string)-strlen($short_string);
  for($i=0;$i<strlen($short_string);++$i){
    if($long_string[$i]!=$short_string[$i])break;
  }
  $inserted_string=substr($long_string,$i,$insertion_length);
  if($is_html && $inserted_string[$insertion_length-1]=='<'){
    $inserted_string='<'.substr($inserted_string,0,$insertion_length-1);
  }
  return $inserted_string;
}

function DOMElement_getOuterHTML($document,$element){
  $html=$document->saveHTML();
  $element->parentNode->removeChild($element);
  $html2=$document->saveHTML();
  return string_getInsertedString($html,$html2,true);
}

function getFollowers($username){
  $x = file_get_contents("http://twitter.com/".$username);
  $doc = new DomDocument;
  @$doc->loadHTML($x);
  $ele = $doc->getElementById('follower_count');
  $innerHTML=preg_replace('/^<[^>]*>(.*)<[^>]*>$/',"\\1",DOMElement_getOuterHTML($doc,$ele));
  return $innerHTML;
}

2. Copy and paste the following short code to anywhere on your theme files, remember replace your twitter username.

<?php echo getFollowers("yourtwitterusername")." followers"; ?>