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RandomTweetCollection

RandomTweetCollection is a Rails plugin by Jeff Dallien (jeff@dallien.net).
Visit my blog: http://jeff.dallien.net
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/discostu

Give visitors to your site a random sampling of your microblogged thoughts with
a random collection of Twitter status updates, known as tweets. This plugin
uses the twitter4r gem. Rails.cache is used to store a user’s timeline from
Twitter to avoid taxing the Twitter API limit. Default is to store the updates
for 15 minutes for at most 4 API calls per hour but the cache time can be
changed by passing a second parameter when creating the collection.

Add the following line to environment.rb:

config.gem ‘twitter4r’, :version => ‘0.3.0’, :lib => ‘twitter’

Create a new Random tweet collection with:

collection = RandomTweetCollection.new(username)

And get 5 random tweets with:

collection.tweets

Or a different number of random tweets by passing the desired number in:

collection.tweets(10)

Example

username = 'twitter'
collection = RandomTweetCollection.new(username, 10.minutes)
collection.tweets(3).map(&:text)
=> ["Update delay http://tinyurl.com/6j5tkz",
    "Updates no longer delayed http://tinyurl.com/6zw85s",
    "Database machine issue http://tinyurl.com/5c3qv5"]
collection.tweets(3).map(&:text)
=> ["Friday report http://tinyurl.com/3zjpay",
    "Stale follower counts for users with large followings http://tinyurl.com/c9mmmy",
    "Replies tab disabled http://tinyurl.com/6c4qsg"]

Copyright © 2009 Jeff Dallien, released under the MIT license