Everyone gets frustrated at work (I know I do) and after a particularly brain numbing assignment, I decided to blow off some steam this weekend and take another crack at my script for piping Twitter updates through Google Reader.
I feel like I might be over-pimping this lately, but it has become my favorite "low-stress" project - it’s still in the fun "idea" phase and hasn’t been tainted by mountains of legacy code and years of neglect and shortcuts.
On the last go-round I added links to @users and fixed a problem with the link-parsing regex. This time the focus was to add user avatars to the RSS feed.
While I did succeed in adding the avatars, I also ended up completely re-implementing the way the script parses RSS.
Initially, the script was coded as a quick hack using event-based XML parsing (what can I say - I’m used to Cocoa), but I have now switched to using the PHP DOMDocument object. Check out this page as a reference.
The re-factoring also pushed me to reconsider the script’s name. I have been calling the script Twitterfeed, which was the second name that popped into my head, but in deference to the folks over at twitterfeed.com, I decided to change the name to GTweet.
Version 2 of the script can be found here. You can also take a look at the source code if you’re interested.
Go to gtweet.net for more details.
A little support and encouragement goes a long way - if you like/use the script, let me know in the comments!