MooTools TwitterGitter and Cookies

By  on  
TwitterGitter

One of my MooTools plugins I use most is TwitterGitter. TwitterGitter is a small MooTools plugin I've created to fetch any number of tweets from an Twitter user's account. Since clients don't tweet very often, there's no advantage to pinging Twitter for a tweet every page load. To save Twitter a bunch of repetitive requests, I use cookies to save the latest tweet.

The MooTools JavaScript

var tweet = '';
if(!Cookie.read('latestTweet')) {
	var myTwitterGitter = new TwitterGitter(init.twitterHandle,{
		count: 1,
		onComplete: function(tweets,user) {
			tweets.each(function(tweet,i) {
				if(tweet.text) {
					Cookie.write('latestTweet',tweet.text, { duration: 1 });
					tweet = tweet.text;
				}
			});
		}
	}).retrieve();
}
else {
	tweet = Cookie.read('latestTweet');
}

Pretty simple: if the cookie is there and fresh, use the cookie's value as the tweet; if not, go get the tweet from Twitter. Of course the most optimal method of saving tweets is caching them server-side but if you use TwitterGitter, I recommend using cookies to avoid unnecessary pings to Twitter.

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

  • By
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create an Animated Sliding Button Using MooTools

    Buttons (or links) are usually the elements on our sites that we want to draw a lot of attention to. Unfortunately many times they end up looking the most boring. You don't have to let that happen though! I recently found a...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools LazyLoad

    Once concept I'm very fond of is lazy loading. Lazy loading defers the loading of resources (usually images) until they are needed. Why load stuff you never need if you can prevent it, right? I've created LazyLoad, a customizable MooTools plugin that...

Discussion

  1. Hey this is great. I have been using your twitter plugin for a while and was kinda forced to stop using it because twitter would block my site as a referer pretty often. That might solve this issue

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!