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
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

  • 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...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Detect Vendor Prefix with JavaScript

    Regardless of our position on vendor prefixes, we have to live with them and occasionally use them to make things work.  These prefixes can be used in two formats:  the CSS format (-moz-, as in -moz-element) and the JS format (navigator.mozApps).  The awesome X-Tag project has...

  • By
    MooTools Star Ratings with MooStarRating

    I've said it over and over but I'll say it again:  JavaScript's main role in web applications is to enhance otherwise boring, static functionality provided by the browser.  One perfect example of this is the Javascript/AJAX-powered star rating systems that have become popular over the...

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!