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On the Solspace.com redesign, I wanted to leverage tweets as testimonials about our work. I knew from experience with our clients that automated systems are subject to spam, so we decided to use Twitter's favorites functionality as a curation tool. Greg Ferrell modified EllisLab's Twitter Timeline plugin to pull from favorites. For a short while we used that to display tweets directly from Twitter onto the site.

Pretty quickly we learned that depending on Twitter's search API creates a fragile system. The API limits requests per IP. If you are on a shared server then you may be sharing this limit. Additionally, Twitter's API changes occasionally. These issues can potentially leave an empty spot on our site or even a page that won't load. I've seen a situation on a client site where the client was displaying their own tweets, but they tweeted infrequently and the search API wouldn't pull their older content, sometimes leaving the space on their site devoted to tweets empty.

To foolproof this system and to give us additional filtered display options for tweets, we now use Solspace's Importer to put tweets into weblog entries. After hearing about a recent Twitter API change that caused problems on some sites displaying content directly from Twitter, I thought others might find this technique useful.

To do this, you'll need the Twitter Timeline plugin and the Importer Module. Importer is currently available only for EE1.x, but it is in our pipeline for conversion.

Make an XML feed

Here is our template code for the XML feed

The parameter favorites="yes" will not do anything in Twitter Timeline natively. As mentioned previously, we modified it to pull favorites.

We find Twitter's responses unreliable, XML is frustrating enough without Twitter throwing in some extra tricks. If you test your feed from a shared server and it comes out empty, try testing again later, your server limit for requests may have been hit.

Make a weblog to hold your Twitter data

Our custom fields are:

• Screen Name {tweets_screen_name}
• ID {tweets_id}
• Profile Image URL {tweets_profile_image_url}
• Name {tweets_name}
• Text {tweets_text}

In preferences, set "Automatically turn URLs and email addresses into links?" to off.

Configure Importer

• Under "Create and Edit Import Profiles" select "New XML Profile"
• In the tabs at the top, select "XML from Web Source"
• Add a Profile Name
• Assign your new weblog as the destination weblog.
• Once you do this, a default status select should appear. Assign that.
• Our Duplicate entry handling settings are:
  • Check for duplicates?: yes
  • When a duplicate entry is found, what should the default action be?: Do nothing (Skip)
  • When a duplicate entry is found, override the old categories with the new categories found in the incoming data?: Override the old with the new
• We have no fixed fields
• Email notifications go to Kelsey and I and the template reads:

  Hello Christy and/or Kelsey, {total_inserted} tweets were updated on {import_date}. You deserve a break. Go outside. Love, Christy

• Email sending rules are: Send email at the end of an import
• Primary XML tag is "item"
• XML Method is "Loose XML"
• URL of XML file points to the template that our XML feed is in
• Map of XML to Entry Fields
  
• Key field is set to ID
• Save Profile

Once you save, on the view/edit profiles screen, you'll see a line for your new profile with a link "Remote Access URL". Clicking this link displays the URL that triggers your import. We have this link bookmarked and hit it manually when we favorite things, but you could also set up a cron to hit it.

Further Potential

Once tweets are in weblog entries they can be searchable, tagged and categorized. You also know that they'll show up to the party and older tweets won't be lost.

If you try this out I hope you'll let us know how it goes.