Combine multiple twitter feeds into one list with PHP?

Question

Hi, How would I go about combining multiple users twitter feeds into one list and display them on my page?

Answer 1

You'd have to go in, I'd say, three steps :

• Get the feed of each one of the users
  • Those are available as RSS feeds ; for example : http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/17907318.rss
  • This means you can download it with curl, or download+read it with simplexml_load_file.
• When you have downloaded the feed for each user, and parsed it, you have several arrays of feeds.
  • You'll have to merge those into a single array, containing all the feeds of all users ; see array_merge
  • And, then, probably sort that array by date ; see usort
• And, finally, you'll have to display the resulting array, the way you want it.

As a sidenote : downloading several RSS feeds each time you want to display your resulting page is not a good idea : it will slow your site down a lot -- which means you need to put some caching mecanism in place :

• either cache the tweets data ; for example, using a MySQL database
• or cache the whole resulting portion of HTML code

Answer 2

You can also create a list of the accounts you are interested in and place a list widget on your page. No PHP needed.

http://help.twitter.com/entries/76460-how-to-use-twitter-lists

http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_list