Twitter API 2 RSS

A while back I wanted to see every tweet a specific twitter users posts, but clicking on that user specifically was like watching blogs pre RSS reader days. So I started by consuming the rss feeds twitter produced but it was simplistic and to follow a link you had to copy and paste the link or click to the tweet and then click to the final page. I made a custom parser to pull in tweets and use the api to get a much nicer look to them. And everything was peachy for me.

During all the talk about RSS being removed from twitter and facebook (now back), I realized that the same code could be retooled for use by others. So after toying around with it a bit and having some random people test it out, like @sarahintampa, it’s finally ready for more people to try.

Here’s a sample of how the output that the code will display in Google Reader.

I was thinking of making it a service but I have no idea how to get past twitter’s api limit of 150 calls per hour from a single ip address. If anyone knows how please let me know and I’ll see what I can do about get this out so you don’t have to host your own.

I put it up as a gist if you want to give it a try.
Twitter API 2 RSS

I have the .htaccess rewrite and code setup to be run from a /twitter directory off your root. There are three modes that it currently handles.
1) /twitter/username – this generates a feed of a named users statuses.
2) /twitter/username/favorites – this generates a feed of a named users favorites.
3) /twitter/username/listname – this generates a feed from a names users twitter list

There are also a few points of configuration.
1) $only_links – set it to 1 if you want only tweets that have links in them.
2) $title2tweet – by default the first link in the tweet gets used as the rss link. set it to 0 to link to the tweet instead.
3) $proxy – some hosts require proxy’s for outbound
4) $tag_case – lets you modify the hashtags as they show up as rss categories.

Couple future enhancements
1) new config to allow you to filter out retweets
2) pass through of additional twitter api querystring options

If you’re interested this is a screenshot of my current RSS Reader pet project. You can see tweets from @elijahmanor