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.
11 comments | Tags: 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.