I’ve created this project in order to simplify the process of interacting with the Twitter API on a project I’m working on. So I decided to release it as open-source so that others could use it if they find it useful.

What is TwitterPHP? It’s an object-oriented and easy to use PHP library to interact with the Twitter API. It is still in development but it has almost every API feature implemented, which makes it the most complete of it’s kind (at least from what I’ve seen out there, please correct me if I’m wrong). You can do lots of stuff with TwitterPHP, you can write your own client, or bot, or even just use it to display twitter info on your blog or website.

You can check out the Google Code project page and soon I will host the phpdoc online, to make it easier (but it’s already included in the zip file).

Link: twitterphp.googlecode.com

Image taken from here

I’ve been away from this blog for some days because I’ve been busy changing jobs. I’m now working in a new place in a full-time job and left the part-time one at Faculdade de Ciências. My new workplace is now at Mr.Net as a Web Developer.

In the meantime I’ve also been developing some toy apps, that are almost done. One is a tool to use with Filebuster, that downloads every file linked on a web page and the other one is a twitter bot that alerts you (by sending a direct message) when a specified web page has changed (aka gets updated). All basic stuff, but proved to be useful in certain situations.

This week was marked by a unfortunate event. The very well known social bookmarking web-service – mag.nolia – on Friday morning experienced data corruption and loss on their servers. The site has been taken offline and probably some users will never see their lost data again.

This might sound like it’s no big deal, but if you think about not only the users that lost their bookmarks, but also on the number of apps that used ma.gnolia’s API to justify it’s existence, it may sound catastrophic.

This issue provides us a lesson on backups and warns us about the trust we build on web-services that are mistakenly taken for granted. Even well known companies have their break downs, and the risk of data loss should always be taken into account.

Fortunately I use delicio.us for my social bookmarking, but this event made aware that every data I store online may be lost someday. So maybe it’s time to backup everything, or to build a tool that does it all for me.