Twitter $get help

Question

Just wondering if someone can assist me with the following issue. I have come across the following code which pulls in latest Twitter posts and displays them on a site:

//Handle the scrolling of the tweets in the footer
$(function () {
    var tweetVP = $("#footerTweetsViewport");
    arrTweetNav = ECC.tweetArray();

    thisTweetID = arrTweetNav[0];

    $("ul#tweetControls > li").bind("click", function(e) {
        e.preventDefault();

        var thisPos = $.inArray(thisTweetID, arrTweetNav);

        if ($(this).hasClass("tweetPrev")) {
            nextPos = thisPos - 1;              
        } else {
            nextPos = thisPos + 1;
        }
        nextID = arrTweetNav[nextPos];

        //If that tweet exists in the DOM...
        if ($("#listOfTweets > #" + nextID).length) {
            //Reset the inactive buttons
            $("ul#tweetControls > li").removeClass("inactive");
            //Scroll to the destination
            tweetVP.scrollTo("#" + nextID, 200);
            //Set the thisID to the value of the nextID
            thisTweetID = nextID;
        }

        //Disable the controls if we're on the first or last tweet
        if (nextPos == arrTweetNav.length-1) {
            $("ul#tweetControls > li.tweetNext").addClass("inactive");
        } else if (nextPos == 0) {
            $("ul#tweetControls > li.tweetPrev").addClass("inactive");
        }
    }).bind("mousedown", function() {
        $(this).closest("li").addClass("click");
    }).bind("mouseup", function() {
        $(this).closest("li").removeClass("click")
    });

});

//Search the dom for twitter containers that need tweets loaded for
$(function() {
    $(".globalTweetWrapper").each(function() {
        var thisUsername = $(this).attr("class").replace("globalTweetWrapper ", "");
        var tweetContainer = $(this);
        var loadTweets = tweetContainer.find(".loadTweets");
        //Detect if we're going to flush the tweets
        var flushTweets = $.getUrlVar("flushTweets");
        if (flushTweets != 1) {
            flushTweets = 0;
        }

        $.getJSON("get-tweets.cfm?username=" + thisUsername + "&flushTweets=" + flushTweets, function(data) {
            if (data.length && loadTweets.length) {
                loadTweets.remove();

                $.each(data, function(i,item) {
                    if (tweetContainer.attr("id") == "listOfTweets") {
                        tweetContainer.append("<li class='tweetContainer' id='" + item.ID + "'>" + item.TWEET + "<small class='darkGray'>" + item.DATE + "</small></li>");
                    } else {
                        tweetContainer.append("<p class='tweetContainer'>" + item.TWEET + "</p><small class='darkGray'>" + item.DATE + "</small>");
                        if (i == 1) return false;
                    }
                });

                //Rebuild the tweet array
                arrTweetNav = ECC.tweetArray();
                thisTweetID = arrTweetNav[0];
            }
        });
    });
});

This is the HTML container for the Tweets on the site is as follows:

<div class="footerItem posRelative">
<h3><a href="twitter url goes here/mytwitterid" rel="external" title="Follow us on    Twitter">Follow us</a> on Twitter</h3>
<ul id="tweetControls">
<li class="tweetPrev inactive">Previous Tweet</li>
<li class="tweetNext">Next Tweet</li>
</ul>

<div id="footerTweetsViewport">
<ul id="listOfTweets" class="globalTweetWrapper">
</ul>

My site is not coldfusion; therefore I simply want to modify the get-tweets.cfm and would like some assistance please. I have come across the following:

//initialize a new curl resource
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'twitter url goes here/statuses/user_timeline/twitterusername.json?count=10');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$content = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

if($content === FALSE) {
//Content couldn't be retrieved... Do something
} else {
//Content was retrieved do something with it.
}

So I would really like to rebuild the get-tweets.cfm to a PHP script get-tweets.php; however, I'm not sure what exactly I need this to do to get this to work as per the coldfusion script as everything else is fine?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Twitter provides tweets in JSON format via the API. You need to retrieve these, cache them on your server (write out to a file outside of the web tree) in case Twitter goes down as it regularly does, then echo the JSON out for the Javascript to pick up.

I haven't tested this, but its definitely along the right lines. See bavotasan.com

$username = "your-user-name";
$num = 5;

$feed = "http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=" . $num;

$newfile = dirname(__FILE__)."/twitternew.json";
$file = dirname(__FILE__)."/twitter.json";

copy($feed, $newfile);

$oldcontent = @file_get_contents($file);
$newcontent = @file_get_contents($newfile);

if($oldcontent != $newcontent) {
    copy($newfile, $file);
}
$tweets = @file_get_contents($file);

echo $tweets;

I should note the above solution is designed to replace the coldfusion script entirely. To use the PHP excerpt you already have, just add the caching to file, and echo parts. That should get you most if not all of the way there.

Answer 2

A new get_tweets script to get tweets, filter to the columns you wanted, cache (in case of Twitter fail whale) and echo results.

<?php

$username = "danielgwood";
$num = 5;

$feed = "http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=" . $num;

$cachefile = dirname(__FILE__)."/twitter.json";

// Get new contents
$newTweets = @file_get_contents($feed);

// Filter columns
$tweets = array();
if($newTweets !== null) {
    $newTweetsObj = json_decode($newTweets);

    foreach($newTweetsObj->results as $tweet) {
        $tweets[]['ID'] = $tweet->id;
        $tweets[]['TWEET'] = $tweet->text;
        $tweets[]['DATE'] = $tweet->created_at;
    }

    $newTweets = json_encode($tweets);
}

// Cache result
if($newTweets !== null) {
    @file_put_contents($cachefile, $newTweets);
}

$tweets = @file_get_contents($cachefile);

echo $tweets;

?>