Retweet Shirt Photo by Deb Hanson - http://www.flickr.com/photos/debspace/3766841512/

Just released an update to ReTweeter (1.1), which now uses the Twitter API for Retweeting. This means that instead of the traditional “RT: @username” syntax, the retweeted tweets will now show Twitter’s little retweet icon and the link to the original tweet (where it says “about 4 hrs ago”) preserved, and the retweeting user’s name at the bottom, like so:

Screencap by Jeronimo Palacios - http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeronimo_palacios/4093181811/

Instead of what Retweeter used to produce, which looked more like this (rt: @username):

Or this (username: tweet):

Thanks to Cody Wilson at QC Co-Lab (@qccoloab) for the patch for this. Of course, if you’d like to keep the old format, you can just set ‘USE_OLD_FORMAT’ to true in the configuration section, and retweeter will keep using the older format.

I’ve also started storing the md5 hash (required for OAuth) in the database instead of recalculating it each time retweeter gets called. (If you ever need to change your md5 hash, say because you’ve regenerated your OAuth token at Twitter, just delete the row in the ‘conf’ table and retweeter will create a new hash the next time it runs).

Note that you will have to alter database tables if you’ve previously used a version of ReTweeter from 1.0 or before – but I’ve included the necessary SQL statements in the README included with the download.

All was well and good until the OAuthpocalypse arrived:

The OAuthpocalypse was the end of basic auth, the mechanism involving storing your username and password, which earlier versions of ReTweeter used. Well, Twitter did shut off basic authentication, though in reality it took a bit longer than the announced August 31:

Photo by Bruno Pedro http://www.flickr.com/photos/bpedro/4951321821/

Luckily this weekend I found time to update ReTweeter to accomodate OAuth – get the new ReTweeter 1.0 and give it a try. I’ve used Abraham Williams’ OAuth for Twitter library, which itself relies on Andy Smith’s OAuth library for PHP. Both are MIT licensed and are included in the download.

You’ll need to register your retweeter with Twitter at the register an application page, which will give you a “Consumer Key” and a “Consumer Secret” – you’ll need to copy these values into the configuration section at the top of retweeter.php.

Twitter Application Settings (Click for Full Size)

Then, making sure you are logged in to Twitter as the username for which you will run Twitter (the account which will follow people and where the retweets will be posted), click on the “My Access Token” button in the right rail of the Application Settings page. Here you’ll need to copy the Access Token and Access Token Secret to the appropriate places in retweeter.php:

OAuth Tokens for ReTweeter

Now that you’ve got all the info, open retweeter.php and (in addition to the existing configuration like username, database username, database password, database host, and database name) fill out the OAuth section of the configuration:

// we'll need some OAuth stuff here
// register your retweeter at http://dev.twitter.com/apps/new
$consumer_key = 'Consumer Key';
$consumer_request = 'Consumer Secret';

And:

// then click on "my token" on the resulting page and get these (make sure
// you are logged in AS THE USERNAME you intend to use, as these keys are
// specific to the user:
$retweeter_oauth_token = 'Access Token';
$retweeter_oauth_secret = 'Access Token Secret';

That should do it!

I’ve also updated Retweeter to follow the RT convention, so retweeted tweets will now look like this:

(@drunkjeckman is an old account which I no longer use except for testing. I expect my twitter followers to determine my level of sobriety based on the content of my tweets, not my username).

Went better than the WordPress talk yesterday, in terms of time – easier to describe Twitter (which everyone already knows) than to try to cover the WordPress plugin API, the Facebook API, and the plugin I wrote to connect the two all in less than 30 minutes.