Twitter has become a useful flow of updating information - an alternative headline source from an RSS feed. How do you incorporate such a flow into your web site?

There are Javascript widgets which you can incorporate into your page, available from twitter (so much less prone to spec change than a third party tool), via http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets.

If you want to try one of these out ... go to that link and then link on to "My Website", and you'll be off and experimenting.

Here's an example underway - and remember that you can use # and @ tagging and other advanced search options (there's a useful link from the experiment page that list out the available options) if you don't simply one to follow one tweeter.


Then grab the code and incorporate it into your site. It will look something like this:

<script src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js"></script>
 
<script> new TWTR.Widget({ version: 2, type: 'search', search: '#wiltshire',
  interval: 6000, title: '', subject: 'What\'s happening in Wilts?', width: 250,
  height: 300, theme: {
    shell: { background: '#8ec1da', color: '#ffffff' },
    tweets: { background: '#ffffff', color: '#444444', links: '#1985b5' }
  },
  features: { scrollbar: false, loop: true, live: true, hashtags: true,
    timestamp: true, avatars: true, toptweets: true, behavior: 'default'
  }
}).render().start(); </script>

The Twitter folks have done it very nicely - the separate script download hides all the complicated stuff, and the stuff that's spelled out within your page is clearly understandable parameters that you can easily deal with.

I've added feeds for the Melksham Chamber of Commerce on to their front page - see www.melkshamchanber.org.uk - both the Chamber's own tweets, and a "Happening in Melksham" feed. Do take a look ... I'm thinking that having both may be a bit over the top, and you may see just one of them if you visit after the next Chamber meeting on 22nd March 2011.

If you want to include a tailorable Twitter feed on your site, we'll show you how on our PHP Techniques Course.
(written 2011-02-27, updated 2011-03-04)

 G905 - Well House Consultants - Blogging and Blog Administration
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H307 - PHP - Web2 and caching
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  [3029] PHP data sources - other web servers, large data flows, and the client (browser) - (2010-11-04)
  [2545] Scraping content for your own page via PHP - (2009-12-21)
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  [2196] New Example - cacheing results in PHP for faster loading - (2009-05-24)
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