SweetTweets 2: Attack of the URL Shorteners
Today I'm happy to announce that SweetTweets (both the stand-alone cfc, and the Mango plugin) have been updated and are available for download.
Huge, huge, huge hat tip to Ray Camden, who brought this proejct to my attention. After deconstructing how it worked, I was able to rip out the old search method that SweetTweets did and replace it with the same technology. If you're curious about the tech, I'll get into it a little bit after the download links.
For now, the short version of the story is that link reverse lookups are finally possible -- which means that ANY url shortening service* can be used, and you'll still get your tweetbacks... Yes, even bit.ly!
SweetTweetsCFC users can download version 2.0 from the Riaforge project page. Mango Blog plugin users can get the latest version here:
- Plugin:
- SweetTweets
- Version:
- 2.0
- Requires:
- Mango Blog 1.2+
- Auto-install URL:
- http://fusiongrokker.com/get/SweetTweets
How does it work?
There's a service available called Topsy that has their own API, including reverse-lookup for links -- essentially exactly what I was looking for in my last post about Tweetbacks. And since we don't have to lookup and cache what the short url's are, you should notice that SweetTweets is much faster than previous versions. The only thing I rewrote was the search tech. Local caching and AJAX access are more or less untouched.
If you were using custom code to implement SweetTweetsCFC, you'll notice that the getTweetbacksHTML and init methods have two new optional arguments allowing you to specify the header text for when there are or are-not tweetbacks found. I'm pretty sure that's about the only interface change. The data returned should be roughly the same. Oh, and I updated the links that it adds to hashtags to use search.twitter.com instead of hashtags.org, which is the new standard; and I also fixed a bug where only the first hashtag in the tweet would be converted to a link.
Using Topsy does have its own limitations. They limit results to 50 tweets per page, and I don't see the need to implement paging, so at the moment the most you can get back is the 50 most recent tweets.
*I'm not sure if shorteners that add a "bar" (frame?) to the page will work. This includes services like ow.ly (the shortener used in HootSuite).
Posted in Mango | My projects | 2 Responses
http://topsy.com/tb/fusiongrokker.com/post/sweettweets-2-attack-of-the-url-shorteners