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!

Do I know for sure?  Absolutely not.  Do I have inside information?  Absolutely not.  Was I randomly observant one night and saw something that seemed to push me to think in this direction?  Yes.

Back in December, Twitter blogged about its “feature test with businesses” of a new Contribution API they were adding in to Twitter.  One that would allow companies to give users permission to tweet on behalf of the main account, and still attribute that post to the user who wrote it.

If you wanted to see this in action, all you would have to do is look at the main Twitter account, where almost every post and retweet is attributed to one of the employees.

They originally announced that this feature would improve usage of applications like @CoTweet and @HootSuite.  But if you look at their timelines, you see very little Contribution API dabble – until recently, that is.

Looking through CoTweet’s posts all the way back through December, none of them have contribution metadata – except for the latest two on February 18th and 19th.  HootSuite has only one, posted on February 18th (none earlier, and none later).  This brings to mind:  Twitter must have recently been rolling out (or testing) their Contribution Feature – or are we really supposed to expect this to be coincidence?

And all of this with the Twitter Developer Meetup Scheduled for Monday, March 1st 2009.

All I’m saying is, I think they’ve gotten much closer to rolling out Contributions.  Maybe they’ll announce it at this small developer meetup, since everybody already knows about it.  Then again, maybe they won’t.

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.

• The ability to block someone from showing up in your timeline, but not block them from following you.
• The ability to allow users to send you DMs, even if they’re not following you (and block them from doing so on an individual basis).
• The ability to see all @replies from your friends – I WANT THIS BACK

That is all.

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 pushed Version 2 Build 10 of the Twitter API Library to github.  This new version still does not fix any of the previous errors, so the changelog is quite minor.

• Updated to TwitterOAuth v0.2-beta
  • “fixes several bugs”
  • Support for OAuth 1.0a
• Added a boolean return to require_login().

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.