This is a short tutorial showing how to use a custom PHP script and some JQuery AJAX action to fetch and display tweets from Twitter for a specific user on your site, or blog, without having to use complicated API keys, oAuth requests, or third-party applications.

Twitter allows you to send a "Server-Side" request to one of their URLs which can be used to get a user's timeline in JSON format. In this example, i am using JQuery.getJSON() to load data from a PHP file ( see below ) that will get the tweets code from Twitter, parse it and return a custom JSON object with all the pieces i need to format the tweets in any way i want once the request is done on the JQuery side.

I have provided all the files you'll need for this example, including the custom object for loading and formatting the HTML on the page with the download .rar file for this post. You can view the example page here: AJAX Tweets With JQuery.

Twitter Request URL

http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/USERNAME.json

In order for this to work, your PHP installation needs to have the CURL library configured. If not, it only takes a few lines of code to install from a terminal ( Ubuntu/Debian ):

sudo apt-get install php5-curl
service apache2 restart

PHP ( tweets.json.php )

// turn off any PHP error messages that might pop up 
error_reporting( 0 ); 

// try to get the tweets 
GetTweets( $_GET['uid'], $_GET['max'] ); 

// fetch the tweets and return raw JSON data for JS 
function GetTweets( $uid, $max )
{
	$uid = ( !empty( $uid ) ) ? trim( preg_replace( '/[^w-_]/i', ', $uid ) ) : '; 
	$max = ( !empty( $max ) ) ? $max : 5; 
	$url = 'http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/'.$uid.'.json'; 
	$out = array( 'status'=>'ok', 'user'=>array(), 'tweets'=>array() ); 
	$num = 0; 
	
	// check for user name first  
	if( empty( $uid ) ){ $out['status'] = 'failed: no user id.'; } 
	else
	{
        // fetch the user tweets from Twitter 
        $c = curl_init(); 
        curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_URL, $url ); 
        curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10 ); 
        curl_setopt( $c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true ); 
        $str = curl_exec( $c ); 
        $obj = ( !empty( $str ) ) ? json_decode( $str ) : false; 
        curl_close( $c ); 
        
        // check for errors 
        if( empty( $obj ) ){ $out['status'] = 'failed: could not fetch tweets.'; }
        else
        {
        	// build the user data first 
            $out['user'] = array( 
            	'user_id'     => $obj[0]->user->id_str, 
                'full_name'   => $obj[0]->user->name, 
                'screen_name' => $obj[0]->user->screen_name, 
                'image_url'   => $obj[0]->user->profile_image_url, 
                'description' => $obj[0]->user->description, 
                'location'    => $obj[0]->user->location, 
                'created_at'  => $obj[0]->user->created_at, 
                'web_url'     => $obj[0]->user->url, 
                'twitter_url' => 'http://twitter.com/'.$obj[0]->user->screen_name,  
                'reply_link'  => 'http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text='.urlencode( '@'.$obj[0]->user->screen_name )
            );
            
            // build list of tweets for this user 
            foreach( $obj as $tweet )
            {
            	// check for user specified limits 
                if( $num >= $max ){ break; } $num  ; 
                
                // clean the tweet text and auto link hashes and user names 
                $txt = trim( strip_tags( html_entity_decode( urldecode( $tweet->text ) ) ) ); 
                $txt = preg_replace( '/(https?://([w.-_/] ))/i', '<a title="Open link in new tab" href="$1" target="_blank">$1</a>', $txt ); // links 
                $txt = preg_replace( '/@([w_-] )/i', '<a title="Twitter page for: $1" href="http://twitter.com/$1" target="_blank">@$1</a>', $txt ); // people 
                $txt = preg_replace( '/#([w_-] )/i', '<a title="Search twitter for: $1" href="http://twitter.com/search?q=#$1" target="_blank">#$1</a>', $txt ); // hashes 
                
                // add to tweets array 
                $out['tweets'][] = array( 
                	'tweet_text'  => trim( $txt ), 
                    'replied_to'  => $tweet->in_reply_to_screen_name, 
                    'posted_date' => $tweet->created_at, 
                    'full_name'   => $tweet->user->name 
                );
            }
        }
    }
		
	// return final array back as JSON data 
	echo trim( json_encode( $out ) ); 
}

Using JQuery to load the the PHP script

$(function()
{
	$.getJSON( 'tweets.json.php', { uid:'@Google', max:10 }, function( data )
	{
		// data.status should say ok on success, or an error message 
		// data.user is an object containing all the user information 
		// data.tweets is an array of objects containing each tweet
	}); 

});