MooTools TwitterGitter and Cookies

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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.

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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

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