Symphony.

Sorry to drag this up again, but I've never been satisfied that I've approached anything close to an answer that makes sense regarding why I can't pull in my Twitter timeline using a Dynamic XML data source, or the Remote Data Source extension.

When trying to create any data source (any timeline at all, not just my own) using Twitter's API, the result is the attached image.

I can't believe I've ever really been hitting a rate limit – for starters, Google analytics suggests that I'm pretty much the only person who checks my website, and I've always cached the result for at least 60 minutes.

If anyone has any new light to shed, I'd be very grateful to hear it.

Thanks,
D

Attachments:

xml.png and json.png

Image is missing.

Twitter are dropping support for xml and rss feeds, so that could be it. Try using Remote DS to serve up the json version of your feed.

I hate being that guy. Sorry, images are attached above, now. I'd seen that rss feeds were no longer supported, but I could still see the xml feed in a browser so didn't think that would be it. All the same, I tried with a json feed using Remote DS (and a variety of screen names), but constantly get 400-ed.

Hi David, not sure about your setup.. but you mentioned being possibly limited... if you are on a shared host for example could this be related to someone else on the same IP address flooding twitter thus its ignoring your requests...

Hi gunglien – I've wondered about that before; I don't suppose there's any way around it (short of upgrading my hosting)?

I might look at a JavaScript alternative.

Cheers.

@david, are you using version 1 or version 1.1 of the API? Version 1.1 is only available if you are actually authenticated, and it will throw 400 errors when you don't provide the auth details... You might try to authenticate yourself and see if that solves the problem.

If it doesn't, something you might try to see if using a CDN fixes the problem for you (I am not suggesting this as a forever-fix, but more as a debugging tool). I recommend trying the Coral CDN to test this.

edit: what coral does is give you the IP address of a computer somewhere close to you. The requests from these IP's are cached, so you are not very likely to hit the rate with these. However, you still might, which is why I don't recommend to use this for a live website - it might go down when you least expect it.

@creativedutchemen, I was trying with API version 1; I had previously looked in to authenticating myself with version 1.1, but I didn't really know what I was doing, so I put it on hold (gave up).

Do you have any advice for authenticating myself from Symphony?

Thanks for the Coral CDN recommendation – I'll take a look if/when I've given up trying to do it legitimately (again).

david for Authentication you could look into using the oAuth extension... its not 100% finished yet - as in I need to add support for extensions to use it... as tokens are currently maintained for front-end users but I guess you could still have a quick look at the code and use some of its classes without necessarily installing it. It supports twitter 1.1 so could be a start.

Thanks, gunglien. You might remember that I was pestering you for assistance in the oAuth thread a little while ago… unfortunately, I'm still not comfortable enough with PHP to be able to achieve much with this on my own, yet.

But I'm learning (and I'll also wait for a hopefully favourable outcome to this recent thread that I see you've weighed in on).

For the meantime, I've decided to go with the much-less-than-perfect jTweetsAnywhere jQuery plugin which was the most customisable option I could find once I'd decided to resort to a third party. It's doing a reasonable job (you can see the results here: sumnoise.com).

Thanks again.

Ah yes you are right! I hope to actually find 1/2 weeks and dedicate some time to oAuth.