As it’s so utterly and incredibly easy to do this, I thought I’d add to the resources of how to post to message to your Twitter account using PHP and Curl.
So, to add to the other PHP scripts I’ve been plonking out here, here is the PHP source code to a simple function which will post to a Twitter account. Send data to it from a form or a service, or even another script, even from an llHTTPRequest from an LSL script in Second Life! Easy and interesting stuff, that messaging.
Now, I have been battling with this on and off for ages. Soon Google will be moving all ‘old’ Blogger accounts over to their Google Account system. This means that all those people who have third party applications to post to their blogspot Blogger accounts will need to switch over to the Google login and system (and get a Google Account, if they don’t already have one) – rather like Yahoo! will be doing to flickr users on the Ides Of March – Beware!
All these third party apps will need to be upgraded too. The thing is, we all want security right? So, you really want to go and register your application with Google to remove the big yellow Warning box you might start seeing a lot of soon.
The documentation to do this with PHP has been non-existent, which I found pretty weird as I bet there are plenty of PHP-based systems out there offering the ability to post to Blogger. (BlogHUD is one that I created for Second Life, which is a model system for something bigger and ‘real’ I have planned soon)
So, for those of you out there who are looking to do this for your own PHP systems hop on over to this post of mine on the Google Group for Google Accounts (crossposted to the Blogger Dev Group) and see the link to the source PHP example I have provided down at the bottom of that post.
For those who can’t be arsed reading all the intro and explanation, here is a link to the PHP source example, where there are plenty of comments to explain what is going on, each step of the way.
This example only goes as far as listing a users’ blogs, after obtaining a non-expiring secure token for your users, which itself has to be generated using secure signing methods. You’ll want to use this new-found knowledge to do cool stuff like post to the users’ blogs.
Man, am I glad to get that bug out of my head! It’s been there for months!!! I hope this helps others get the same out of theirs!
You should be able to use this example to build a connection to any of the Google services. This is just using Blogger.
I will finish by saying that WordPress support for doing the same thing is EASY!! No problems. Ever. Whatsoever. Great job! Rockin!
I’ll also add that I don’t do this sort of thing much – and by that I mean posting my code up online. But I have learned SO MUCH (if not all foundation knowledge) on the web, that doing stuff like this makes me feel good. I can feel the Karma restoring – step by step
Looking forward to seeing what PHP fanatics and gurus are getting my favourite scripting language to do. Also speaking is the father of PHP himself, Rasmus Lerdorf (who now works for Yahoo!). Looking forward to that!
UPDATED: To support Curl, if it is installed. It appears that some servers have the ‘fopen’ wrapper disabled, preferring Curl – which is faster too ! )
OK, so I have just knocked up a PHP5 script which, WITH SOME MORE WORK (on your part) will grab all your photos from flickr, should you want to move away from them.
This script takes your screen name and then lists all your photos, with the original photo file url, the title, description and any tags, comments and geocoding data too.
That’s as far as I go – the script is not doing any downloading at all – I leave the rest up to you You could add the details to a database, store images anywhere you like, ftp them somewhere – it’s up to you to get the PHP to do what you want.
If I get the time, I will create a desktop version which does the same thing. The tricky bit might be deciding on a static xml format for all the rest of the data – maybe a big RSS file would do. Or OPML. Or both?
NB: You MUST have PHP5 with simplexml and fopen wrappers or Curl activated (Some webhosts prefer you to use Curl, so they deactivate file_get_contents)
Enjoy! Feel free to use this code and hack and mash it up at will. Please add to the comments of this post, if you do extend it. Cheers!
Now, I have been battling with this on and off for ages. Soon Google will be moving all ‘old’ Blogger accounts over to their Google Account system. This means that all those people who have third party applications to post to their blogspot Blogger accounts will need to switch over to the Google login and system (and get a Google Account, if they don’t already have one) – rather like Yahoo! will be 
