Twitter's API has Changed

Saturday, May 31, 2008

A couple days ago, I noticed that the Twitter statuses that show up on my website were no longer returning entries more than 24 hours old.  This was curious, because when I hit the URL directly, I was able to see all the updates.  Turns out the difference was authentication; if I logged out of Twitter, the direct URL gave me the same results that I saw on my website.  Yesterday, I noticed that no Twitter updates were appearing.  I figured Twitter was just having a bad day, but this morning I saw that it still wasn't working.  On investigation, it appears that Twitter has changed the behavior of their API.  Now, I can't get any status results at all without HTTP authentication.

Normally, this shouldn't present a problem.  But I was using the PHP function file_get_contents() to retrieve the data, and this doesn't support any HTTP request options.  The http_get() function does, but this requires a PECL extension, which isn't installed on my host's server, and which my host is not willing to install.

So began the quest for a workaround.  I noticed on the StartLogic control panel that there was a section listing PEAR modules.  I had thought this was empty, but then realized that it was actually just hidden; you needed to click on the heading to see the modules.  And so, scrolling through the list, I saw that among the modules listed was "HTTP_Request 1.2.4 stable".  Okay, interesting.  I pulled up the PEAR documentation, executed the example as written, and lo and behold, it worked!  This also provided a means for supplying basic HTTP authentication...which also worked just like the example.  Amazing.  So, I then updated my Twitter module, and we're back in business.

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Jesus left the perfection of heaven to come here, to suffer and die, that we might be saved.
So may we also have the mind of Christ!