Design Grid

Most of my clients are on twitter, this results in my clients wanting to show their latest tweets on their home page.

While Twitter provide JavaScript ‘badges’ to show your latest tweets, it it sluggish and what happens if a user has JavaScript disabled?

My workaround for this was using php to parse the users RSS feed.

//RSS Feed URL
$rss_url = “http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14942878.rss”;

if (!$rss_data = @file_get_contents($rss_url)) {
echo "Oh snap, it seems twitter is down :(";

} else {

$rss_xml = SimpleXML_Load_String($rss_data);

$channel_title = $rss_xml->channel->title;
$channel_link = $rss_xml->channel->link;
$tweets = array();
foreach ($rss_xml->channel->item as $item) {
$item_title = $item->title;
$item_link = $item->link;
$item_description = $item->description;

$tweet = explode(": ", $item_title);
$tweetmessage = preg_replace("/(http:\/\/[^\s]+)/", "$1", $tweet[1]);
$tweetmessage = preg_replace("/(@[^\s]+)/", "$1", $tweetmessage);
$tweets[] = $tweetmessage ;
}
echo $tweets[0] ;
}

This chuck of code uses a regular expression to parse the XML of your RSS feed, puts each tweet into an array.

Example: Display your 5 most recent tweets:

echo $tweets[0] ;
echo $tweets[1] ;
echo $tweets[2] ;
echo $tweets[3] ;
echo $tweets[4] ;

Enjoy!

So, maybe this is a bit off topic but it is so cool, I had to share it anyway.

Yesterday, I built my own status board (inspired by this: http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/)

This is a brief over view of what it does.

It’s built using PHP/MYSQL and uses AJAX requests every 20 seconds to keep it updated constantly.

It shows the latest projects that are not started yet, ready to go, and active. It also has the days events/to-dos, does needing Rice & Sour Cream count as an event?

It is updated via a simple PHP/MYSQL backend from my local machine.

The bottom center module is a real time server status that pings each server to check that it is still alive and well.

The most exciting module is the bottom right that executes an IMAP request to pull the number of unread emails from my googlemail and my work email accounts.

That’s all there is to it, but it looks pretty cool mounted on the wall.

I’d love to know your thoughts on it!