Simple way for read only twitter api usage

Question

Hello, probably like many people my site has been affected by twitter deprecating basic authentication, so I was looking at implementing OAuth. But all I want to do is just pull the last couple of tweets from my account - I don't need to post anything, it's just readonly access to the user timeline. I've seen a couple of posts showing how to do this easily with javascript, so i'm thinking it might also be similarly straightforward with PHP (i.e not requiring OAuth)? One reason for having to use PHP instead of Javascript is that i need to check when the rate limit is about to be exceeded, then I cache the last couple of tweets for the required amount of time.

If OAuth is the best solution, I'll get on with that - grateful for any suggestions though!

Answer 1

I wrote a article showing how to do this:

http://philsturgeon.co.uk/news/2009/07/How-to-Create-a-Twitter-feed-with-full-syntax-support

but the basics are even easier. It all boils down to:

$tweets = json_decode(
    file_get_contents('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/philsturgeon.json?count=10')
);

Enjoy.