NetTuts.com: Building With the Twitter API: Tweet Storms

NetTuts.com has posted the second part of their series about creating a Twitter client on top of the Yii framework. In this new tutorial they focus on "tweet storms", the use of a series of tweets to share a thought rather than just cramming it into one.

In April, investor and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen began expanding on the natural 140 character limits of Twitter by publishing his thoughts in sequences of tweets, which some have dubbed tweet storms. [...] A few services arose to make it easier for mere mortals like ourselves to publish tweet storms but they seemed a bit unreliable and inconsistent. I decided to build the feature myself and I think there's value in doing this with your own app.

He outlines the features that the "tweet storm" feature needs to support and the database models/migrations that you'll need to store the related data. He uses Yii's generators to create the needed skeleton classes for the models and controllers. He moves on to the code needed to handle the group tweets management and to compose the tweets that will make up the "storm". Finally, he includes the code you'll need to create the publishing feature, pushing it into both the models/database and out to the Twitter API. You can then use the "OEmbed" information provided by Twitter to view the series of tweets via another simple page (code included here too).

Link: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/building-with-the-twitter-api-tweet-storms--cms-22459