juust ~ php oddities

tweeting pipes

juust | 30/06/2009

…but serious, channels on Twitter are a hot item.

Twitter seem to want branded channels for commerce by using verified accounts to prevent spoofing celebrities, and the same goes for brandnames. There is already a growing trade in twitter accounts like @nike-shoes, @skyeurope.

To build an attractive channel I need credibility, provide regular good quality fresh content, so where do I get that :

Yahoo pipes

I am very lazy and Yahoo have a nice example online, the news aggregator with 14 sources like blogsearch, icerocket, technorati, that you can clone and use out of the box. So I cloned it, replaced the technorati api key and run the pipe with ‘banking’ as keyword. I grab the rss feed url and read that with simplexml (you can use that pipe with any keyword).

Then I take a twitter php api class from sourceforge (it only reads the account, it doesnt have the post-routines), by simon wippich, wire in the rss-feed and start posting content.

require_once('twitter.class.php');
$Twitter = Twitter::getInstance();
$Twitter->setUser('Account','SomePassword');
$rss= simplexml_load_file("http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=1234567890&_render=rss&textinput1=banking");
if($rss)
{
foreach($rss->channel->item as $e)
{
$shrunk = file_get_contents('http://bit.ly/api?url='.$e->link);
$msg = trim(substr($e->title, 0, (137-strlen($shrunk)))).' '.$shrunk;
$output = $Twitter->post($msg);
}
}

neofinance

Now I can post proper stuff.

The second part of a channel is the audience.

Where to get my audience ?

Google Search

Google serp scrapers are always good for 1000 targetted results on any keyword : i use
allinanchor:twitter.com/ site:twitter.com banking
as search phrase, that gets me 95% valid accounts with my keyword banking in the description

$key = 'banking';
//scrape urls
$urls = twt_Google('allinanchor:twitter.com/ site:twitter.com '.$key);
//get the account names
$accounts = twt_Google_getaccounts($urls);
function twt_Google($keywords, $pages=1) {
//scrape results off of google serp
$lang='en';
$results=100;
for($i=0;$i< $pages;$i++){
$start = $i*100+1;
$vargoogleresultpage = "http://www.google.com/search?as_q=".urlencode(trim($keywords))."&num=".$results."&start=".$start."&hl=en&lr=lang_en";
$googleresponse = join("",file($vargoogleresultpage));
$googlehits = preg_split('/class=r><a /', $googleresponse, -1, PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
$i=0;
foreach($googlehits as $googlehit){
$i++;
preg_match("/href=\"(.*?)\"/", $googlehit[0], $t, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
$the_urls[] = $t[1][0];
}
}
//return a set with twitter urls http://www.twitter.com/account
return $the_urls;
}
function twt_Google_getaccounts($arr) {
//get the account name from the twitter-url
for($i=0;$i<count($arr);$i++){
$parts = explode('/', $arr[$i]);
//account is 3 : http: // … / account
$myaccounts[] = $parts[3];
}
return $myaccounts;
}