Twitter's API has Changed
A couple days ago, I noticed that the Twitter statuses that show up on my website were no longer returning entries more than 24 hours old. This was curious, because when I hit the URL directly, I was able to see all the updates. Turns out the difference was authentication; if I logged out of Twitter, the direct URL gave me the same results that I saw on my website. Yesterday, I noticed that no Twitter updates were appearing. I figured Twitter was just having a bad day, but this morning I saw that it still wasn't working. On investigation, it appears that Twitter has changed the behavior of their API. Now, I can't get any status results at all without HTTP authentication.
Normally, this shouldn't present a problem. But I was using the PHP function file_get_contents() to retrieve the data, and this doesn't support any HTTP request options. The http_get() function does, but this requires a PECL extension, which isn't installed on my host's server, and which my host is not willing to install.
So began the quest for a workaround. I noticed on the StartLogic control panel that there was a section listing PEAR modules. I had thought this was empty, but then realized that it was actually just hidden; you needed to click on the heading to see the modules. And so, scrolling through the list, I saw that among the modules listed was "HTTP_Request 1.2.4 stable". Okay, interesting. I pulled up the PEAR documentation, executed the example as written, and lo and behold, it worked! This also provided a means for supplying basic HTTP authentication...which also worked just like the example. Amazing. So, I then updated my Twitter module, and we're back in business.
