Twitter changes their format for status feeds

Tweets not showing up? Twitter changes their feed format for status feeds

You may have noticed over the couple of weeks that the usual Tweets from my Twitter account @strictlytweets have not been showing in the right hand side bar.

This is because Twitter have changed the URL that you must request to get those tweets from.

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/strictlytweets.json?count=10

To their new API which uses a secure URL (e.g from http to https)

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=strictlytweets&count=10

Now if you have a callback function it would be called in the same way with a parameter passed in the URL for the name of the function to be called.

Although I am not sure whether Twitter have changed their name of their standard function which formats Tweets into links from twitterCallback to twitterCallback2 if you take a look at the one blogger uses you can see they are calling it twitterCallback2.

You can see their script here:

http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js

Therefore if you have a special function that you need to call to format your tweets in your own style, cache on your own server or scroll them you will still need to add the name of your callback function to the script source and make sure it accepts a JSON hash table of Tweet objects.

You will also need to reference this script before calling the new script URL that gets the statuses.

If you look at this blog you can see that the first script loads in bloggers own formatting of the Tweets in  through a call to blogger.js and the second one gets the new Twitter feed status format in the new URL format using JSON.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=strictlytweets&callback=twitterCallback2&count=6"></script>

Twitter are constantly changing and like most sites are moving to secure URL's e.g https and using JSON instead of XML/RSS to return data to the user.

So if you have a Twitter account and want to show your own Tweets on your site and it hasn't been working lately this is the reason why.

Just switch over to the new https format and you will be okay as long as you also implement some form of caching to handle the rate limit which is only 150 requests per hour per IP address NOT per domain. Or if you authenticate each request with OAuth you can make 350 requests per hour.

As my IP address is also shared by a lot of other sites that use this feature the Tweets may still not appear until I come up with a form of caching (which I haven't got round to doing) but the logic would be something like this.

• Make the request to the new API URL.
• Format the HTML using your callback function.
• Make an AJAX request to a server side script (PHP/ASP/.NET etc) that stores the formatted HTML as a text/html file.
• If you get back a 400 Status Code (Bad Request) which is the code Twitter send you when you exceed their rate limit. Then you can display this HTML file instead.

You can read more about rate limits here.