After getting an hour or so to focus on coding around the Twitter issue I previously posted about, I think I have a fix. For whatever reason the Twitter API is accepting requests from CURL but not from Twitter Tools use of the PHP library Snoopy. Not all PHP installs have the CURL extension installed, so my code uses it if it’s there, otherwise it defaults back to the code Alex King, the author of Twitter Tools, wrote to use the Twitter API.
I’m going to leave a comment on Alex’s site pointing him to this post. I’m putting the code here for download if anyone wants it. I’m also leaving a patch file here for Alex in case he’s interested in using it. I’m not sure it’s worth it or not – not my call. I’m just happy I can spam…errr…inform those at Gestalt using Twitter when I have a new post on this blog. Sure, they can do that even better using RSS, but that’s not as cool as saying you got it off Twitter. Heh.
This is not an issue in Alex’s code, as he points out in a recent blog post. This is an issue with Twitter’s infrastructure, which users are noticing more as the service has grown. Scaling web apps/services is hard. I’ll have a post on that in the not so distant future.