Intereactive Web Design - Sugar Land, TX

I had a little personal project where I needed to combine my wife’s and my Twitter feed into one common feed. This was so we could display it on our blog and it would show in realtime what we were doing. Not a problem using Yahoo Pipes since our accounts are unprotected and open to the public. I created a simple pipe to combine the feeds and sort by date.

This past week I had another personal project where we have a large music festival with lots of people that will be twittering while the event is going on. Many of them have their account protected (for whatever reason) and short of asking them to unprotect it for the week of the festival, there is no easy way to get access to their feed. I couldn’t even get access to it for a few days because once you open your feed to the public anyone can see all your history.

What I needed was a way to grab their twitter feed only during the festival so I put my brain in overdrive and shortly after came up with a pretty elegant way of doing it. I had remembered using a script called Snoopy that is a PHP class that simulates a web browser. I dug through the Twitter API and found the “friends_timeline” call, which is basically a feed of all my friend’s tweets (what you see on twitter.com/home). I put the 2 together and had the core of a script that would let me login to Twitter and pull the tweets for everyone I follow.

There are two ways to go from here. You could create a dedicated Twitter account and follow just the people you want to display on the overall feed. Or you can create an array of usernames in your code that is used to filter only the ones you want in the overall feed. In my final code I choose to go with the later for simplicity.

Here is the core of what I wrote to pull in the feed via XML

require_once('snoopy.class.php');
$snoopy = new Snoopy;
$snoopy->agent = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)';
$snoopy->user = 'your_twitter_username';
$snoopy->pass = 'your_twitter_password';
$snoopy->fetch('http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml');

// Make sure we connected to the API
if (strpos($snoopy->response_code, '200')) {
	// Use PHP's SimpleXML functions
	$xml = simplexml_load_string($snoopy->results);
	foreach($xml->status as $status) {
		// Do your code here using the format:
		// $status->id
		// $status->user->screen_name
		// etc...
	}
}

There are a few things to note:
1) The main thing is that if someone has their Twitter marked as “protected”, it is that way for a reason. Be SURE you have their permission to pull their tweets only during a set time of your event or whatever you are doing.
2) The Twitter API will only display the latest 20 tweets. To get around this I created a PHP file using the above code and I run it on a Cron Job every 1 minute, dumping the results in a database table. Then I pull from that DB table when I display the feed. Here is the complete file that I use (I added the Snoopy class so it would be self contained): twitter_grab_cron.zip