twitterFetch

Fetches your latest tweets

Show your latest tweet or tweets on your website.

Twitter offers two options to show your twitterfetch on your website:

1. Using a Twitter widget
2. Using the Twitter REST API

They are fully supported by Twitter and might be the best solution for you.

Disadvantages are:

1. Limited layout possibilities (widget).
2. Cookies are send to Twitter, which, without warning, might be illegal in your jurisdiction (widget).
3. Page load (widget).
4. Needs server side scripting (api).

TwitterFetch provides a solution without these disadvantages. It fetches the Twitter widget (without sending cookies) and makes the tweets available in JavaScript, to be placed on a webpage the way you want. Less than 2kB, twitterFetch is also very lightweight.

TwitterFetch uses unsupported Twitter functionality, so there's no guarantee of continuity.

Quickstart

Start by downloading twitterfetch.js to you server and including it in your web page.

<script src="twitterfetch.js">

In your HTML, make sure you have a place to show the tweets:

<div id="tweets"></div>

Now, use twitterFetch to fetch the tweets and show the first one:

twitterFetch.fetch('345615146724495360', {}, function (tweets) {
	if (!tweets || tweets.length == 0) {
		return;
	}
	document.getElementById('tweets').innerHTML = tweets[0];
});

But don't use the widget id 345615146724495360, that belongs to my @edwinmdev Twitter account.

How to make your own widget id?

Create a Twitter widget and look at the generated code. You'll find data-widget-id="..." with the number you can use.

API

The twitterFetch fetch function takes three parameters:

twitterFetch.fetch(widgetId, options, callbackFunction);

widgetId

The widget id you get when creating a widget, see above.

options

An object literal with several options:

images (boolean): when false, prevents loading images that are not needed (default: false).

plaintext (boolean): when false, encodes some entities to make the text safe for HTML (default: false).

hyperlinks (boolean): when true, turns urls and Twitter @usernames into hyperlinks (default: true).

Example:

{
	images: false,
	plaintext: true
}

callbackFunction

The function that is called back with one argument containing an array with tweets.

License

TwitterFetch is copyright 2016 Edwin Martin and MIT licensed.