Navarr's Tech Side

So, you think you’ve had a lot of fun with twitter on the web and all those twitter clients you’ve played around with?  What if I told you that you haven’t seen anything yet?  What if I told you that you could use Twitter in a TRUE Command Line Interface with specific commands for interacting with twitter.

Welcome to one of my latest and greatest creations, TwCLI.

TwCLI supports almost everything twitter has to offer, and will soon be expanding to support even more!  TwCLI includes a long list of commands, help information for each command, a theme-able interface (Specify a Pre-Determined theme, import from your twitter profile, or even specify an external CSS file!), Geo-Location, Retweets, and even Contributor Support!

Go ahead, give it a try and tell me what you think!

Code block
   
// Retrieve user’s Zipcode
// Demo at http://sandbox.gtaero.net/zipcode.html
function retrieve_zip(callback)
{
	try { if(!google) { google = 0; } } catch(err) { google = 0; } // Stupid Exceptions
	if(navigator.geolocation) // FireFox/HTML5 GeoLocation
	{
		navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position)
		{
			zip_from_latlng(position.coords.latitude,position.coords.longitude,callback);
		});
	}
	else if(google && google.gears) // Google Gears GeoLocation
	{
		var geloc = google.gears.factory.create('beta.geolocation');
		geloc.getPermission();
		geloc.getCurrentPosition(function(position)
		{
			zip_from_latlng(position.latitude,position.longitude,callback);
		},function(err){});
	}
}
function zip_from_latlng(latitude,longitude,callback)
{
	// Setup the Script using Geonames.org's WebService
		var script = document.createElement("script");
		script.src = "http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodesJSON?lat=" + latitude + "&lng=" + longitude + "&callback=" + callback;
	// Run the Script
		document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script);
}
function example_callback(json)
{
	// Now we have the data!  If you want to just assume it's the 'closest' zipcode, we have that below:
	zip = json.postalCodes[0].postalCode;
	country = json.postalCodes[0].countryCode;
	state = json.postalCodes[0].adminName1;
	county = json.postalCodes[0].adminName2;
	place = json.postalCodes[0].placeName;
	alert(zip);
}
retrieve_zip("example_callback"); // Alert the User's Zipcode

Apparently I’ve completely broken simpleTAPI somewhere between Build 27 and Build 30.  I thought I had fixed it with Build 29, but it seems that I was mistaken.

In lieu of this, I am putting simpleTAPI on a temporary hiatus.  I will be re-constructing it from scratch (though, probably looking back and using a good bit of the original code).  The next version should have several configurable options, and will hopefully interact with the Twitter API much better than the previous versions.

Build 30 was supposed to return results as an array([“TAPI”] => data, [“result”] => data).  But all I’m getting from it at the moment is “Unable to Authenticate User.”

Those wanting to use simpleTAPI should use Build 27, though you will have to deal with some minor quirks in the way results are returned.  (the TAPI array is simply appended to the results array, making things slightly complicated if you don’t unset($result[“TAPI”]);

What will be simpleTAPI 0.4 should have better error handling, better return data, and better built-in caching.  I’m also hoping to build in support for xAuth and Delegated OAuth, if at all possible.  (Though probably not since simpleTAPI is built upon another OAuth library).

So, I’m asking for any and all feature requests.  Is there something about simpleTAPI you don’t like or want to be improved?  Please, post in the comments below!

A lot of people use my Simple Twitter Feed written in JavaScript (for some reason).  Well, today I pushed out a quick update that should fix all the woes users have given me in the past.

The code should now be valid XHTML strict, and I know longer use innerHTML for each list element.  Instead, I’ve moved from adding the list elements via innerHTML to DOM Manipulation (appendChild).  I’m not sure exactly what the benefits of this are, but I’m sure they exist.

As the previous HTML code seems to have been broken, this may cause some rendering errors for a few websites, but all in all it should work better than it has previously.

I’m not writing out a whole changelog, I’m just going ahead and saying that some changes were made – and hopefully Simple Twitter should work a lot easier for everyone using it.

Usage:

• Call createLightbox(); to create the actual lightbox element (does not display anything).
• Call fillLightbox(string content) to fill the lightbox with RAW HTMLor

  Call appendLightbox(element childElement) to append a DOM Node directly into the lightbox.

• Call setLightboxSize(int width, int height, null, string unit) to set the width and height of the lightbox.  Unit will default to pixels “px” if not specified.
• Call showLightbox() to actually display the lightbox to the user.
• Call boolean lightboxVisible() to determine if the lightbox is still visible or not.
• Call hideLightbox() to remove the lightbox from view.
• Call cleanLightbox() to delete all content inside the lightbox container.

I pushed the 子猫ちゃん Google Voice OMS service’s code to github, so you can now download it – albeit, to make it work it’ll take a lot of hacking and a lot more editing.

Either way, I’ve gotten no donations and no offers for free SSL hosting, so it looks like this project just will not be seeing the light of day.  It’s a shame, I worked a long time to make it work, and it’s obviously something a lot of business professionals would be able to find a use for.

Oh well, you can find the project on github.

Remember to abide by the Usage License!

I’ve renamed the Twitter API Library to “simpleTAPI.”  Yes, I’m not very good at names when it comes to this sort of thing.  We’ve jumped forward two builds since my last post here.

Build 15

• The addition of a quick variable, bool Twitter::geo_enabled.
  Returns TRUE if the user has turned on geo functionality, FALSE if not.

Version 0.2.1

• Re-Organized classes.  Separated TwitterOAuth and OAuth into separate files, and moved them along with Twitter into a “twitter” folder.  All classes can be loaded simply by including Twitter.lib.php.

Build 16

• Fixed a minor inconsistency in TWML where different functions returned different links to a twitter user’s profile.
• Fixed a bug where specifying screennameonly=TRUE for TWML::name resulted in an empty hyperlink.

Examples

• Started work on Example files to teach how to use simpleTAPI.  Currently, the only one included is a basic Update script.  This file includes logging in, updating a status, and returning the same status as well as some basic TWML examples.

So, enjoy!  I will continue to improve this library.  Please remember to post all issues and feature requests either on this blog or the github page.

I pushed Build 13 today.  This build adds the recent addition of descriptions to a user’s list.

This change breaks:

• TwitterAPI::lists_create and
• TwitterAPI::lists_update

The new profiles for these commands are as follows:

TwitterAPI::lists_create( str $name [, str $description = NULL [, bool $privacy = TWITTER_PRIVACY_PUBLIC ] ] )

TwitterAPI::lists_update( str $name [, str $new_name = NULL [, str $description = NULL [, bool $privacy = NULL ] ] ] )

If you’ve been watching this blog, you’ll notice I skipped Build 11 – It was small, and was trumped by its quick replacement – Build 12.  Builds 11 and 12 fixed five previous known issues, while build 12 fixed a non-issue with build 11.  Fixes listed below:

• The following now work with all users:
  • Twitter::get_sn_from_id()
  • Twitter::get_name_from_id()
  • Twitter::get_id_from_sn()
  • TWML::name()
  • TWML::profile_pic()
• Addition of User Cache commands for use by TWML and the get_x_from_y() commands.

As always, the most recent build is available at github.

I’ve pushed Build 9 of the Twitter API Library to github today.  Interesting thing, it adds a few missing API features but does not yet fix any of the previous problems.

New features are all Authenticated API Calls:

• search
• trends
• trends_current
• trends_daily
• trends_weekly
• users_search
• trends_available
• trends_location

Yes, that means that we’ve added support for the following portions of the twitter api:

• Search
• Trends
• User Search
• Local Trends

Enjoy, and as always please report any and all errors you get.