Recently, I started "Tweeting" on Twitter. I was really skeptical first, but now that I'm getting the hang of it, I really start to like it.

I saw an article on Tutorialblog on how to create a unique website for Twitter updates. Actually a really good post, but when I looked at the Twitter API, I thought there were much more possibilities. That's when I started diggin' in the code and created an extended version of the Twitter website. Your own profile information is added, tweets from friends and a couple of random followers. Just check out the demonstration.

I'm not going into the PHP details this time (only some explanation on the configuration - Comments are added if you really need to know), but you can download the page from the download section.

  

Remember: Almost everything on that page is dynamically loaded from Twitter. When updates are made (by you or your friends), the page automatically changes too (after reload). Oh, and while you're at it: Follow me on Twitter for more updates!

Unique website for Twitter updates

1. Open up "twitter.php" with any text editor (Notepad, Dreamweaver, Smultron etc.)
2. Find $username and $password on line 10 and 11
3. Change the value between the quotes in your username (not email!) and password
4. Make some additional changes (like changing $nrtweets, $nrfriends and $nrfollowers)
5. Save the file and upload everything to your webserver
6. Check out your own Twitter page!

• Set the number of tweets
• Set the number of friendly tweets
• Set the number of random followers
• Show username and avatar of friendly tweets, with link to Twitter account
• Detect if message is a reply; If so, add "reply" icons
• Based on the template made by Chris Coyier
• Page is fully xHTML valid
• And more! (Check out demo page)

There is a possibility the page doesn't show and gives the following error: Unable to load XML from Twitter. Please try again. This happens when too much requests (70+ in one hour) are made to Twitter and you must try again later.

Conclusion, Download, Demo

This script works exactly as expected; Too bad the Twitter service doesn't allow more than 70 requests per hour. You could think about caching the page, loading it with AJAX etc. to improve the flow.

  

Hope you like it! If you have uploaded this page and configured it at your will, please share it in the comments. Really wondering how pages from other people will look like!

Interested in this topic? You might enjoy another article I've written called

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