Question

I’m trying to develop a web application that mainly uses PHP but i’m using jQuery/Javascript to grab people’s Tweets from their URL: http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/joebloggs.json?count=1&callback=?

The thing is want to run a PHP cron job to grab latest tweets from people who have signed up for my application. But i dont know how to do this with javascript?

Is this possible?

EDIT:

This is the javascript code, can i do this in PHP so i can use a Cron Job?

    $(document).ready( function() {

        var url = "http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/joebloggs.json?count=1&callback=?";
        $.getJSON(url,
        function(data){
            $.each(data, function(i, item) {
                $("#twitter-posts").append("<p>" + item.text.linkify() + " <span class='created_at'>" + relative_time(item.created_at) + " via " + item.source + "</span></p>");
            });
        });
    });

    String.prototype.linkify = function() {
        return this.replace(/[A-Za-z]+:\/\/[A-Za-z0-9-_]+\.[A-Za-z0-9-_:%&\?\/.=]+/, function(m) {
    return m.link(m);
  });
 }; 
  function relative_time(time_value) {
      var values = time_value.split(" ");
      time_value = values[1] + " " + values[2] + ", " + values[5] + " " + values[3];
      var parsed_date = Date.parse(time_value);
      var relative_to = (arguments.length > 1) ? arguments[1] : new Date();
      var delta = parseInt((relative_to.getTime() - parsed_date) / 1000);
      delta = delta + (relative_to.getTimezoneOffset() * 60);

      var r = '';
      if (delta < 60) {
        r = 'a minute ago';
      } else if(delta < 120) {
        r = 'couple of minutes ago';
      } else if(delta < (45*60)) {
        r = (parseInt(delta / 60)).toString() + ' minutes ago';
      } else if(delta < (90*60)) {
        r = 'an hour ago';
      } else if(delta < (24*60*60)) {
        r = '' + (parseInt(delta / 3600)).toString() + ' hours ago';
      } else if(delta < (48*60*60)) {
        r = '1 day ago';
      } else {
        r = (parseInt(delta / 86400)).toString() + ' days ago';
      }

      return r;
}
function twitter_callback ()
{
    return true;
}

Answer 1

The best solution is to re-implement your functionality in PHP:

<?    
$url = "http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/joebloggs.json?count=1&callback=?";
$responseJsonString = file_get_contents($url);
$responseArray = json_decode($responseJsonString, $array=true);

// uncomment this to see what's in the response array:
// print_r($responseArray);
// Now, you can do as you like with $responseArray

And then execute the PHP script via crontab.