V10.5.2 + Splitting Tweets on sending now automatically adds all mentioned users into the subsequent parts rather than just the first one. Tweetings for Twitter v11.14.1.1 Patched Latest. This tutorial is designed to help anyone who is using or wants to create a custom Twitter feed that needs to authenticate basic read-only access for any public user timeline with Twitter OAuth, API V1.1. API V1.1 has been around for a while now but as of March 5th 2013 June 11th 2013, it will be is now depreciated.
Twitter decommissioned v1 of its API in June 2013. The new version, v1.1, enforces Authentication and Display requirements. Currently my interest is in accessing tweets by certain users or in certain subject areas. Previously this involved the ASIHTTPRequest
methods. I would request twitter data via code such as
where the string ‘feed' was of the form say,
@'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=westernbulldogs%20OR%20from%3Awesternbulldogs”
When the request finished a method then parsed the resulting data as follows:
The process of accessing tweets is now more involved. The instructions at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/application-only-auth
were quite helpful and I will summarise the steps I took.
Each app needs to be given a consumer key and consumer secret. The developer arranges this by creating and logging into her twitter developer account
at dev.twitter.com and creating a new application at https://dev.twitter.com/apps. Once this is done the key and secret can be viewed by selecting the app.
The first step in setting up a twitter request is to use the key and secret to obtain a ‘bearer token'. The key and secret are first encoded according to RFC 1738. The result is then concatenated into one string with a colon as the separator. Finally this string is then base64 encoded. A bearer token request is then made. The following method does this work (I have of course disguised the key and secret):
The connectionDidFinishLoading: method detects when the connection has finished. This method then parses the data obtained by the connection and checks to see if a bearer token was sent. If so, we can proceed to request the relevant tweets using the bearer token as the authorisation. The connectionDidFinishLoading code is as follows (tokenData is the data that the connection has provided and is collected in the connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data method):
I use the requestTweets method to send a request to twitter for tweets. It looks like this:
Again the connectionDidFinishLoading method detects when the request has finished. The data obtained is then parsed within connectionDidFinishLoading
with the following code (receivedData is the data that the getTweetsConnection has provided and is collected in the connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data method);
As you can see, you need to do more in v1.1 to get the same information. I have left rate limiting and display requirements out of the above to avoid
complicating matters. In short, Twitter limits the number of requests that users can make and an app needs to ensure that users are not making more requests than they should. A possible penalty for not checking this is blacklisting of the app. In addition Twitter now requires apps to display tweets in certain formats as described on the twitter developer site at https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-requirements.
By Jason Mayes
Why does this exist?
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Recently I was quite frustrated to find out that the old API on Twitter was depreciated and the overhead in setting up a system to perform OAUTH just to get my already publicly available tweets was too damn high (see https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/11564).
Even worse I couldn't find any simple solutions for JavaScript. All code examples were server side. So after much thinking I invented the following solution. It makes use of the over bloated widgets Twitter gives us to put on our sites, cuts out all the nonsense (and non semantic markup), and returns to you your raw tweet text so you can do with it as you please and style it how you want on your own website - like it should be. Instructions on how to get it working with your tweets are in the code comments, just do what it says! Enjoy!
Browser support
All popular browsers supported. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 7, 8 and 9.
Download
See latest link at top right of the page to grab the latest build. Dont forget to check back soon for updates.
Show me the sexy code baby
Please read comments in JavaScript for examples on how to use and how to generate a widget id to use with the component - it is really easy! Here are some examples on CodePen:
- How to use the JavaScript component.
- 3D Twitter Cube - by just changing CSS you can make anything you want as shown here!.
Show me it in action!
Below is the first example above - remember you can change the style to anything you want just by changing the CSS:
Change log
- UPDATE 1: First version released!
- UPDATE 2: Due to popular demand, you can now specify how many tweets you want returned which can be any number between 1 and 20, as the third parameter to the function call :-) Let me know if you have any other requests below.
- UPDATE 3: Due to even more requests, solution now gets recent tweets for user, favourite tweets, list tweets, or hashtag search
- UPDATE 4: Script now handles writing HTML to an element with an ID of your choice making it even simpler to use and allows you to queue up many requests so you can have many items on the same page doing different things eg one might show recent posts with a specific hashtag, whilst the other shows your latest 5 tweets.
- UPDATE 5: Script now supports grabbing who posted the tweet, their profile photo, and link to profile. Also adds the time they posted at the end. All customizable with CSS to look how you want.
- UPDATE 6: You can now specify a custom date formatting function to format the twitter post date however you wish! See comments for how to use.
- UPDATE 7: Now supports IE 7, 8 and 9, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.
- UPDATE 8: You can now not show retweets via a new parameter in function call. See comments in code.
- UPDATE 9: Now supports a custom function callback when data is ready allowing you to have full control over its output.
- UPDATE 10: Now supports Replying / Retweeting / Favouriting.
- UPDATE 11: Due to popularity of this component and number of requests I have now moved its source to GitHub.
Got suggestions? Feedback? Feature requests? Tell me!
At time of writing I have made over 132 changes, and many are the result of feature requests from people like you! I want to help all the developers out there get tweets on their sites once again - with ease, as it should be. Talk to me: Via Google+, twitter, or my website.
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Disclaimer
This is by no means an official solution - it is something I created to solve a problem I had, and has now grown in to a full component. Twitter may change its system in such a way to cause this to stop working. I of course will try my best to adapt to any changes and all future versions of this code shall be posted here, on this site. I suggest you check back regularly for any updates. This is however the only solution I know of to date to get public data from Twitter without using the new 1.1 API which otherwise requires OAUTH tokens with every request and is a lot harder to set up. Lets keep it simple!
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With that out of the way, I hope you enjoy this component, and that it makes your life a bit easier. Jason Mayes
