So Twitter is retiring version 1.0 of its API in March 2013. In its ongoing quest to become (more) evil, Twitter has decided that open syndication standards like Atom are no longer worth supporting. This, in addition to the gratuitously byzantine OAuth system (even for 2-legged auth between my own client and Twitter itself), makes consuming Twitter content anywhere else except on Twitter (and its official apps) an increasingly annoying task. An intended effect, perhaps.
I’m one of the few holdouts who believe current Web standards work just fine. I consume a lot of content from the Web in my native RSS client, as part of my ordinary daily workflow, without using 50 different apps and dozens of notifications. This includes my Twitter home timeline (where I follow just under 70 people/orgs of interest), which under API v1.0 was provided as a simple, standard RSS feed, like other open streams of data on the Web.
I’d been hacking on a Python-based Twitter JSON API to Atom feed proxy for some time, but became increasingly disillusioned with the stupidity of the API — and that it takes two libraries and tons of code to even get the OAuth dance started.
So I thought, in this entire WWW, there must be someone else as annoyed by Twitter’s obstinacy as I am. Sure enough, Russell Beattie developed a single-file PHP script that accesses the authenticated Twitter stream and outputs an Atom feed.
I abandoned my Python code, forked that codebase, and made some minor modifications to suit my personal needs. This patched version is available here:
https://gist.github.com/yimingliu/4735445
All you need to do to use this script is to create your own Twitter app over at https://dev.twitter.com/apps (I called mine “TimelineProxy”), create an OAuth token, and fill in the blanks in the script. Since the new API also has a 100,000 user per application limit, it’s probably best for every user to have his own proxy app with its own token, instead of relying on a central one.
There are some minor differences between my version and the upstream original. Basically this version uses full php tags instead of the less-well-supported short tags, and replaces t.co shortened URLs with their full original URLs. I also take advantage of the html content type in the Atom entry to allow links in the entry text, so in most feed readers any links are “clickable”. Finally, this version returns proper HTTP error codes instead of 200 OK in case of Twitter API errors (like when you hit the rather draconian rate limits on each OAuth token).
However, it preserves the simplicity of the original, which is that you can drop this in the web directory of any PHP-enabled web server (no need for root access or installation of any libraries) and enable your own timeline proxy.
I want to eventually modify this script so that a single server can host any arbitrary user’s timeline as an Atom proxy, provided they give the proper auth tokens. This means having to deal with the OAuth dance at some point. Ugh.
In any case, this disturbing “enclosure movement” of the open Web — taking previously free streams of information and fencing them into walled gardens of content — is a trend that should be opposed whenever possible. My thanks to Mr. Beattie for making the original script.
