Displaying Twitter Updates on a Web Page

I recently began using Twitter, a microblogging service for posting short, chat-like blog entries and reading what other users of the service are doing. The site has severe reliability problems, but it's still an entertaining way to get real-time updates from bloggers I read along with others I know who've been sucked into Twitter's maw.

I wrote some code to display my most recent Twitter update on my weblog, Workbench, in a sidebar at upper right. This afternoon, I've released the Twitter-RSS-to-HTML PHP script under an open source license. The script requires MagpieRSS for PHP, an open source PHP library that can parse RSS and Atom feeds.

MagpieRSS caches feed data, so at times when Twitter is glacially slow or can't be accessed, this script won't hurt the performance of your server.

The first release of the script only works with a Twitter user's RSS feed, which can be found in the "RSS" link at the bottom of a user's Twitter page. The only tough part about writing the script was creating regular expressions to turn URLs into hyperlinks and "@" references into links to Twitter user pages:

// turn URLs into hyperlinks
$tweet = preg_replace("/(http://)(.*?)/([w./&=?-,:;#_~%+]*)/", "<a href="\0">Link</a>", $tweet);
// link to users in replies
$tweet = preg_replace("(@([a-zA-Z0-9]+))", "<a href="http://www.twitter.com/\1">\0</a>", $tweet);

If you're reading this and wondering why anyone should bother with Twitter, I recommend reading the updates by Jay Rosen, a journalism chair at New York University who uses the service to share a running dialogue on the media. He punches above his weight in this 140-character-or-less medium.

Syndicated 2008-07-08 19:36:04 from Workbench