[How I Added My Twitter Feed]

Web

Added on 18/08/2012

Following my decision to leave Facebook, I have decided to start using Twitter more as a means of exchanging information with my friends. Adding a Twitter feed is pretty easy as Twitter does not require you to authenticate so you can just ask for N latest tweets using an ordinary GET request.

I modified original PHP code posted on Stack Overflow to create a single function that gets the feed and converts it to tweet objects containing createdDate and message fields. Also, I added my own algorithm that automatically creates html links when it finds phrases starting with http:// . Finally, I used a method by kn00tcn to convert Twitter date to PHP date object and back to a string with my own formatting.

The PHP function is as follows:

/**
* Get tweets
*/
protected function getTweets() {
   //-- curl request    
   $url = "https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?include_entities=true&include_rts=true&screen_name=elendurwen&count=5&trim_user=true";
   $ch = curl_init();    $timeout = 5;
   curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
   curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
   curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
   $json = curl_exec($ch);
   curl_close($ch);

   //-- parse data:
   $tweets = array();
   if ($json != false) {
      $obj = json_decode($json);

      foreach($obj as $var => $value) {
         //-- convert the date and add 4 hours to it. For some reason the conversion makes the date 4 hours less than it should be.

         $tweet['createdDate'] = date("d/m/Y g:ia",strtotime($obj[$var]->created_at) + 4*60*60);
         //-- get the message text
         $tweet['message'] = $obj[$var]->text;
         //-- add links automatically
         $tweet['message'] = preg_replace('/(?<!a href=\")(?<!src=\")((http|ftp)+(s)?:\/\/[^<>\s]+)/i', '\\0', $tweet['message']);
         //-- replace twitter name tags with links
         $tweet['message'] = preg_replace('/(?<=^|\s)@([a-z0-9_]+)/i','@$1', $tweet['message']);
         //-- replace twitter hash tags with links
         $tweet['message'] = preg_replace('/(?<=^|\s)#([a-z0-9_]+)/i','#$1', $tweet['message']);
         $tweets[] = $tweet;
      }
   }
   return $tweets;
}