Including Twitter updates in your site

admin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:51:10 +0000

A client of mine wanted to include his Twitter feeds into his site. This is quite easy using the cURL library to access the Twitter RSS or XML feed. This might be a nice way to dynamically include additional content into your site. There are Twitter widgets that embed content into your site, but they use JavaScript to do this. Personally, I want this content to be read by bots, so PHP/HTML integration is a good option.

Basically, using cURL, you can bring in the RSS feed or XML feed. The RSS feed only includes date and status, and the XML feed will give you additional information including profile information (website, bio, etc).

I wrote a simple custom function which I’ve used in other examples here on the site called send_request(). This calls the request for the RSS file.

function send_request($rest){
global $rootpath;
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $rest);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$file_contents = @curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $file_contents;
}

This function can be on the same script or in a include file. Next we need to assemble the querystring to send to our function. The function will return the XML which we parse with simplexml_load_string(). I should mention that this script will work with PHP compiled with simplexml and have cURL extension. If you’re using PHP4, you’ll need to use a different method to parse XML using DOM.

$username = ‘hanjicode’;
$rssUrl = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/’.$username.‘.rss’;
$rss_feed = send_request($rssUrl);
$i = 0;

if(strlen(trim($rss_feed)) > 0){
$resp = simplexml_load_string($rss_feed);
if(isset($resp->channel) && sizeof($resp->channel) > 0){
foreach($resp->channel->item as $tweet){
$tweetDate = $tweet->pubDate;
$tweetStatus = change_string($tweet->description);
if($i < 10){
$tweetStatus = str_replace($username.‘: ‘,”,$tweetStatus);
echo $tweetDate.‘ – ‘.$tweetStatus.‘

‘;
}
$i++;
}
}
}

It looks through the RSS result and displays the contents to the browser. Let me know if you have any suggestions with this script or if you have any problems. I’ll be more than happy to help.

Dynamic XML/RSS Feed using PopShops

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:37:45 +0000

Well, I noticed that I haven’t added any code examples in a while, so here is a new one I’m working on now. PopShops is a great tool to display products from different merchant networks like Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareASale, etc. You can quickly create product pages and have them delivered using multiple methods. Methods include javascript, PHP, XML, etc.

I’ve been using the Pro account for a while on a single site. With my continuing efforts to become more diversified I’ve been focusing on more PopShop stores, so I upgraded my account to the Enterprise level. This is important if you want to have unlimited affiliate PIDs, etc. Currently the free or Pro option allows for one affiliate ID / merchant. So if you have many domains listed with CJ, you can only provide one PID to track. That’s a problem, and was an obvious choice to upgrade the account. If you upgrade you also get additional features like XML/RSS options for your store.

With this option you can easily create dynamic XML/RSS feeds. The example below is using XML, since I wanted price and image URLs to be parsed out of the content. RSS includes these directly in the ‘description’ and would require additional, non-needed parsing. My example is also using PHP5’s simplexml_load_string() function. You will need to make sure that PHP is compiled with simplexml support for this to work. If you’re using PHP4 you’ll most likely have to use domxml_open_mem() for this to work. I will not cover/support PHP4 in this post.

You will need to follow these instructions listed at PopShops (http://www.popshops.com/faq/affiliate-rss-xml)

What you will need:
1. A enterprise account

How you do it:
1. Go ahead and create your shop the normal way by searching and adding products.
2. Go to the ‘Pop it in’ tab.
3. Select the ‘RSS2′ or the ‘XML’ option in the code drop down.
4. Copy the link to the rss version of your shop, and paste it into the address bar of your favorite browser (FireFox). It should look something like this:
http://shops.popshops.com/shops/c49…59d6dc61a73.rss
5. You should see an RSS/XML version of your shop.
6. Now just add ?psps_search=KEYWORDS obviously replacing KEYWORDS with whatever term you are searching on. You will now have a keyword driven RSS/XML feed. So for example:
http://shops.popshops.com/shops/c49…earch=ipod+case

$count = false;
$url = ‘http://shops.popshops.com/shops/0snmheiasfasdeadsff_search=star+wars’;
$rss_feed = send_request($url);
if(strlen(trim($rss_feed)) > 0){
$resp = simplexml_load_string($rss_feed);
foreach($resp->product as $item) {
$count = true;
echo $item->name."
";
echo $item->price."
";
echo $item->description."
";
echo $item->url."
";
echo $item->large_image_url."
";
echo "

";
}
}
if(!$count){
echo ‘no records found’;
}
?>

Money-Code » curl

Including Twitter updates in your site

Dynamic XML/RSS Feed using PopShops