RSSDisplay your latest Twitter update with jQuery, part 2
Back in July of last year, we published the article Display your latest Twitter update with jQuery to show you how simple it was to display your latest Tweets on your website using jQuery. Since that article was published, Twitter have made some changes to their core API which affects how the script in this article works. Before carrying on, if you haven’t already, I recommend that you read the original article first so that the following makes sense.
Everything was working nice and smoothly until Twitter changed the way users can retweet from the main Twitter website. Not that this was a bad thing, the new(ish) functionality was a great addition to an already great service. Before the changes, users manually typed ‘RT’ at the beginning of their tweet to signify that they have retweeted it from another user. Now days, you simply click a button which will take care of it for you.
But, as Kerem pointed out in the comments of the original article, our code does not display these new retweets. Instead, it just displays an empty space where your latest tweet should be sitting pride of place. In nearly all circumstances, I would imagine that this is not the desired effect, especially as the retweet functionality is used a lot more these thanks to the new functionality.
As a result, I have got back to the drawing board to investigate how we can get around this problem and improve the current script. If you wish, you can download the sources files before continuing on.
Display your latest Twitter update with jQuery
UPDATE: May 2010 – There is now a new updated blog article that follows on from this article. Once you have finished reading this, please read part 2.
I’m pretty sure that it has not escaped your attention that Twitter is an invaluable tool if you want to communicate with your clients and peers. As you are spending all this time tweeting, it makes sense to display this information on you own website so you can draw in more followers on Twitter and get your voice heard.
There are quite a few tutorials available on this subject and several jQuery plugins that will display your tweets for you, all of which are very good in their individual way. However, this tutorial will show you just how easy it is to use the Twitter API tools with a tiny bit of jQuery to display your latest tweets in a fully customisable, simple and functional way.
First we will create a very basic HTML document to display our latest tweet. Then I will show you how to get the Twitter JavaScript code which will translate the returned data for us. We will be using our Twitter account, @carronmedia in the examples, please feel free to follow us.
Posted in Tutorials | 
26 comments | Tags: Javascript, jQuery, Twitter, XHTML
Extend Google Analytics with jQuery
For quite some time now Google Analytics has been leading the way when it comes to gathering free statistics about the web traffic of your website. I’m sure that you many of you have installed the Google code on your sites and are already using the great reporting tools it provides. However, there are a few limitations to the standard service which you may or may not have come across yet. Using the standard code, we can only track views of pages where the tracking code is installed. It becomes a little bit more difficult if we want to track file downloads and external links, where we cannot add the Google JavaScript.
The aim of this tutorial is to show you how you can modify the standard Google tracking code using the power of jQuery to get extra information from your Google Analytics reports. With jQuery, we can get Google Analytics track your file downloads and clicks to external sites without having to trawl through your code and write any extra mark up.
We are also going to use a new feature of Google Analytics which are known as ‘Events’. This should give you a good base for you to build your own code and extend the power of Google Analytics even more.
Posted in Tutorials | 27 comments | Tags: Google Analytics, Javascript, jQuery
Create an RSS feed with PHP
Having an RSS feed on your website is a great way of sharing your content with the rest of the Internet. It’s not a new technology and it’s probably something that you use on a daily basis. If you have a blog or use any form of CMS, that software will most likely handle the creation of your RSS feed for you.
Sometimes, however, it might be necessary for you to create a RSS feed yourself. Perhaps you have just won a new client who’s current site has a old bespoke CMS which they like and want to keep, but you want to be able to publish their updated content via RSS. Hopefully this tutorial will help you to achieve this.
What is RSS?
RSS, in its current form, stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a family of web formats to publish frequently updated content. The RSS Feed (as it is commonly known) can then be read by the users feed reading software or by another website which wishes to ’syndicate’ the content of that feed.