dangerouslyawesome

I'm Alex Hillman, the co-founder of IndyHall and a guy who makes things better in Sunny Philadelphia.

I work on Beanstalk, Postmark, and DynamicWear.

I think technology is cool, but people are infinitely cooler.

i blog often

but i twitter often-er.

Last night i was having one of my “cant sleep, must code” fits and decided to whip up my own version of a twitter sidebar widget. Now, on the right of every page, you’ll see “what i’m thinking” followed by a short burst of thought.

Twitter, for those of you somehow unfamiliar, finds a happy medium between stream of conscious and blogging. In this particular case, i have 140 characters to answer the question, “what are you doing right now”. The really cool part is it’s updatable via SMS, AIM/GTalk/Jabber, or the REST interface provided in their API. So you get microblogging, on the run.

Anyway, my little mash together utilizes the twitter personal feed, and SimplePie for mega-simple feed parsing.

Code example after the break.

1. <?php
2. require('simplepie.inc');
3. $feed = new SimplePie();
4. $feed->feed_url('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/8412.rss');
5. $feed->cache_location($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/cache');
6. $feed->init();
7. $feed->handle_content_type();
8. if ($feed->data) {
9. $max = $feed->get_item_quantity(1);
10. for ($x = 0; $x < $max; $x++) {
11. $item = $feed->get_item($x);
12. ?>
13. <p><a href="<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>"><?php echo $item->get_title(); ?></a></p>
14. <?
15. }
16. }
17. ?>

[tags]twitter, simplepie, mashup[/tags]

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