Twitter Sidebox? (New module creation help)

**curtc** · 4 Jan 2009, 01:44 AM

Hi,

I've searched and only come across a module that allows for twitter sending sms to your phone at time of sale. With the use of a php parser, I was able to get the last 3 entries of the RSS feed onto a plain html page. Unfortunately, I don't really understand enough about twitter module creation to be able to implement it.

I'm assuming there is some sort of Javascript wrapping that is blocking the php.. or something? At any rate, I either can't echo the $html or push it into the $content variable or maybe the script just isn't running at all...

The code that I'm trying to convert is below. Obviously, for the actual module it was slightly modified to remove tags. Keep in mind that it's for a friend so please ignore the comments

http://www.fridayafterclass.com/rss/twitter_mod.php

Code:

<?php
require_once '/home7/aonecust/public_html/fridayafterclass/rss/rss_php.php';

    $rss = new rss_php;
    $rss->load('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/18300492.rss');
    $items = $rss->getItems();

  $html = '';


reset($items);
while((list($index, $item) = each($items)) && $i<3) {
        $html .= $item['description'].'<br />
                 <a href="'.$item['link'].'">  '.$item['pubDate'].'</a><br />
                    </p>';
        $i++;
    }

?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Friday After Class: Twitter</title>
</head>

<body>
<?php
echo $html;
?>
</body>
</html>

**swguy** · 4 Jan 2009, 03:05 AM

If you can wait, I will do this at some point.

Scott (@thatsoftwareguy)

**swguy** · 4 Jan 2009, 07:02 PM

I started thinking about this today and realized it was a bad idea. If you put it in a sidebox, you'll bear the overhead of talking to Twitter on every page load, which will slow your site down. You'd be better off to add your tweets to an "About Us" page (or create a special page for your tweets using About Us as a template).

Retrieving your tweets is straightfoward:

Code:

<?php
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/YOUR_TWITTER_HANDLE.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=5"></script>
?>

of course count can be adjusted if you wish to show more.

Good luck,
Scott

**curtc** · 4 Jan 2009, 10:35 PM

Originally Posted by swguy

I started thinking about this today and realized it was a bad idea. If you put it in a sidebox, you'll bear the overhead of talking to Twitter on every page load, which will slow your site down. You'd be better off to add your tweets to an "About Us" page (or create a special page for your tweets using About Us as a template).

Retrieving your tweets is straightfoward:

Code:

<?php
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/YOUR_TWITTER_HANDLE.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=5"></script>
?>

of course count can be adjusted if you wish to show more.

Good luck,
Scott

Thanks for your input..

The tweets are really just a simply rss feed. Couldn't you technically just cache it locally if you're worried about overhead? Could also just quit reading the feed after the first (x) number of items? Maybe the solution is to have some sort of twitter refresh button that calls the process to refresh the feed?

Quite honestly, I wasn't too worried about efficiency on this one

**yellow1912** · 5 Jan 2009, 02:51 AM

If it's just rss, you can use the rss module by numinix (cant remember the mod name), it has cache as well.

**curtc** · 5 Jan 2009, 02:39 PM

Originally Posted by yellow1912

If it's just rss, you can use the rss module by numinix (cant remember the mod name), it has cache as well.

thanks, i'll check it out

**paulm** · 10 Jun 2011, 08:24 PM

Originally Posted by swguy

I started thinking about this today and realized it was a bad idea. If you put it in a sidebox, you'll bear the overhead of talking to Twitter on every page load, which will slow your site down.

Exactly what I thought :-)

I finally go to creating a Twitter side box add on that solves those issues by caching the Tweets:
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=181253

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