Creating an RSS feed for your Twitter home page

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Geoff

Updated to use v1.1 of the Twitter API on 2-Mar-2013. See comments below for notes on updating.

I used to read my twitter feed (the tweets you see on your Twitter home page) in an RSS reader, but when Twitter stopped providing that feed I was unable to do so. There are still some feeds supported until March 2013 but they show just your own tweets, tweets from a particular user or for a particular hash tag. e.g.

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=username

To get RSS reading back again I decided to create my own feed and you can do the same. I made heavy use of Adam Green’s code from 140dev.com and he in turn uses Matt Harris’ OAuth library from https://github.com/themattharris/tmhOAuth.

You will need web hosting that supports PHP and you can down load the files I used here (twitter-v1.1.zip updated 2-Mar-2013) and extract them to your computer.

You will also need to get some access keys from Twitter so go to https://dev.twitter.com/apps (you will need to log in with your Twitter name and password).

Click on the create a new application button then provide a name, description and a URL for the application (the URL is just where people can find out about your code – in my case it’s the blog page you’re reading).

The Callback URL is not required in this case. But if you want you can give the URL where your feed is going to be for example http://www.mywebsite.com/twitter/rss.php

Accept the terms and complete the captcha and you will be taken to the settings pages for your application.

Go to the settings tab and select Read only as the application type and update the settings.

Go back to the details tab and click the “create my access token” button at the bottom.

You will now have a page with a number of codes, you will need to copy the values for

Consumer key
Consumer secret
Access token
Access token secret

Now go to the files you downloaded, find the keys folder and in that folder is a file called personal_keys.php. Open it and edit it replacing the dummy values with the ones you copied above.

Also replace the entries in the personal_keys.php file for the domain where you will be hosting the feed. (Thanks to Terry for pointing out my earlier errors.)

Now simply upload the entire folder to your web site and test the feed by entering the appropriate URL into a browser e.g.

http://www.mysite.com/twitter.rss.php

Note, the feed is not secure and anyone with the URL can read the feed. It would be possible to have a password protected feed if you wanted to do some extra work but as tweets are public anyway I decided it wasn’t necessary for my purposes.

If you wanted something other than the home timeline you can change the URL you use to request data in the rss.php file.

$code = $tmhOAuth->request(
        	'GET', 
			$tmhOAuth->url('1/statuses/home_timeline'), 
			array(
          		'include_entities' => true,
    			'count' => 50,
        	)
        );

See https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1 for other options.

29 thoughts on “Creating an RSS feed for your Twitter home page”

Terry Finney on February 2, 2013 at 7:05 pm said:

Firstly, many thanks for posting this.

I did however have a problem setting it up. I solved it by changing the Oauth object as follows:
// create the OAuth object
$tmhOAuth = new tmhOAuth(array(
‘consumer_key’ => $my_consumer_key,
‘consumer_secret’ => $my_consumer_secret,
‘user_token’ => $my_access_token,
‘user_secret’ => $my_access_token_secret,
‘curl_ssl_verifypeer’ => false
));

The user_token and user_secret weren’t being set correctly.

I also noticed that “Fogcat” was hardcoded so that it appeared in the rss feed, regardless of the actual user. While this didn’t seem to cause a problem I removed it by replacing both occurences with:

Thanks again and I hope the above will help others who may hit the same problem.

Reply ↓
Geoff on February 2, 2013 at 9:52 pm said:

Glad you found it useful. I’ll edit out the hard coded bit and re-upload. (New versions of the files uploaded.)

Reply ↓
Chris Simpkins on February 2, 2013 at 10:04 pm said:

Thanks for posting this Geoff. Very useful information. I have a number of users who have emailed about the loss of the RSS feeds from the URL’s that my application generates for them as March rolls around. I will point them over to your post. I seem to recall that Twitter had a restriction against re-syndication of the new API that I came across somewhere in their documentation or blog posts. Do you happen to know if this approach falls within their current terms?

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Geoff on February 2, 2013 at 10:18 pm said:

To be honest I have no idea about how it interacts with their current terms. I only did it so I could continue to read my Twitter stream in my RSS reader of which I’m likely to be the only subscriber. So I regarded as for personal use only.

I don’t really see how it’s any different from embedding tweets in a web page, but I might have to have a read of the terms.

Reply ↓
Geoff on February 2, 2013 at 10:22 pm said:
I found this at https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms
4. You will not attempt or encourage others to:
- sell, rent, lease, sublicense, redistribute, or syndicate access to the Twitter API or Twitter Content to any third party without prior written approval from Twitter.
- If you provide an API that returns Twitter data, you may only return IDs (including tweet IDs and user IDs).
- You may export or extract non-programmatic, GUI-driven Twitter Content as a PDF or spreadsheet by using “save as” or similar functionality. Exporting Twitter Content to a datastore as a service or other cloud based service, however, is not permitted.
So as I’m not providing an API (you can’t call RSS an API) I think it’s fine.
Reply ↓
- Chris on March 5, 2013 at 7:27 pm said:
  
  Thanks!
  
  Reply ↓
Bi on February 11, 2013 at 4:19 pm said:

This code work great, i get my timeline, but i get it like HTML code :/ Can you help me?

Reply ↓
Geoff on February 11, 2013 at 4:37 pm said:

Well an RSS feed is just an XML file and it’s designed for use by a feed reader rather than a human. Normally a browser will make a successful attempt and converting an XML RSS feed into something readable. What are you using to look at the feed?

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Just wondering on March 1, 2013 at 10:32 pm said:

Doesn’t the code in the zip file use the API version that they are going to shut down? Shouldn’t it use version 1.1? Or what am I missing?

Reply ↓
Geoff on March 2, 2013 at 9:11 am said:

Yes looks like you’re right

http://140dev.com/twitter-api-programming-blog/twitter-api-ebook-single-user-twitter-oauth-programming/

I’ll try and get it converted this weekend and update the files.

Reply ↓
Geoff on March 3, 2013 at 12:15 am said:

I’ve updated the files to make sure they use the v1.1 API and I’ve included the latest copy of the OAuth library that was available at the time of the update.

If you’ve already used the files you should upload all the files in the new zip except personal_keys.php. Replacing any existing ones.

You also no longer need to include your twitter name in the personal keys file.

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John Skelton on March 6, 2013 at 12:55 pm said:

Is it possible to retrieve another user’s public tweets using this script? I’ve tried replacing home_timeline with user_timeline?user_id=12345&count=5 but only my own timeline shows up.

Thanks.

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- John Skelton on March 6, 2013 at 12:58 pm said:
  
  Ah! Figured it out just after I posted that last comment. It should be like:
  
  $code = $tmhOAuth->request(
  ‘GET’,
  $tmhOAuth->url(’1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json’),
  array(
  ‘include_entities’ => true,
  ‘count’ => 5,
  ‘user_id’ =>12345,
  )
  );
  
  To get the tweets of another user ID.
  
  Reply ↓
  - Geoff on March 6, 2013 at 11:18 pm said:
    
    Glad you figured it out.
    
    Reply ↓
pie on March 15, 2013 at 4:06 am said:

RSS still works for now, but I’m not sure how much longer this will last.

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name={TWITTER-USERNAME}

Replace “{TWITTER-USERNAME}” with a valid Twitter username.

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Zakerias on April 6, 2013 at 1:11 pm said:

Wonderful, thanks for this Geoff. It’s working smoothly on my forum.

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ANDY on April 9, 2013 at 7:04 am said:

Hi, great article. I have been trying to get this to work for search hashtags without success. Could someone be so kind as to let me know what the code should change to for a search hashtag feed? Thanks.

Reply ↓
- admin on April 9, 2013 at 9:17 am said:
  
  Can you do it with a search?
  
  https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/search/tweets
  
  This might also be useful
  
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2714471/twitter-api-display-all-tweets-with-a-certain-hashtag
  
  Reply ↓
Regis on April 11, 2013 at 1:39 pm said:

Hello,

The new RSS feed for a user timeline is indeed :
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name={TWITTER-USERNAME}

But does someone knows what are the new RSS feeds for LISTS and SEARCHES ?
(before it was :
- http://api.twitter.com/1/{TWITTER-USERNAME}/lists/{TWITTER-USERLIST}/statuses.atom : for LISTS
- http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?lang=en&q=%20HEYWORD%20: for SEARCHES)

Thanks a lot !
Regis

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Zakerias on April 12, 2013 at 4:09 pm said:

Hello me again,

The code is still working fine and my RSS feed poster is posting the results to a sub-forum of mine. What I wanted to ask is there a limit or some sort of block stopping my RSS feed poster from posting tweets every 60 minutes?

I have setup the poster so that it should post a new tweet every 60 minutes but it seems to only pick one out every.. week?

Many thanks

Reply ↓
- admin on April 14, 2013 at 8:25 am said:
  
  I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “RSS feed poster”. Is this a variant of the code that makes a new tweet for you?
  
  Reply ↓
bob on April 14, 2013 at 1:38 am said:

Hi
I’ve set this up on Google App Engine using http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/tag/quercus/. I’m getting the following error.
tmhOAuth.php:442: Fatal Error: ‘hash_hmac’ is an unknown function.
I’m not good at php. I guess hash_hmac function isn’t supported.
Is there any work around.

Thanks in Advance.

Reply ↓
- admin on April 14, 2013 at 8:23 am said:
  
  hash_hmac seems to be used by the tmhOAuth package and should be part of PHP versions 5.1.2 and above).
  
  http://php.net/manual/en/function.hash-hmac.php
  
  I don’t know anything about the Google App Engine but it looks like their version of PHP doesn’t support it for some reason. What version of PHP does the GAE provide?
  
  If it’s lower this page says it provides a version of hash_hmac for PHP 4
  
  http://www.ulrichmierendorff.com/software/aws_hmac_signer.html
  
  Reply ↓
  - admin on April 14, 2013 at 8:29 am said:
    
    Ahh just checked your link and it seems Quercus is a Java implementation of PHP so it probably doesn’t support all PHP functions. You could try implementing your own version of the function – maybe the code I linked to will help.
    
    Reply ↓
    - bob on April 14, 2013 at 11:54 am said:
      
      Hi Admin
      
      Thank you very much for your response.
      
      Yes you’re right. Quercus, a Java implementation of PHP is not supporting the function hash_hmac.
      
      I’m not good at PHP, so couldn’t fix it despite of your suggestions.
      
      Ok No problem, the code is working fine when hosted on a different php hosting service.
      
      And many thanks to you for this very useful post.
      
      Cheers
      Bob
      
      Reply ↓
      - admin on April 14, 2013 at 2:25 pm said:
        
        You could try adding the php files in this zip file to the same directory as the rss.php file and add the line
        
        include(“php4_hmac.php”);
        
        after the requires at the top of rss.php.
        
        I’ve not tested it – so no promises.
Garrett on May 4, 2013 at 1:01 pm said:

Has anyone used the above code to get “list” statuses? I can get the home timeline to work ok, but can’t get lists to work. I keep getting this error: “You must specify either a list ID or a slug and owner,” even though I provide the requested info. Here’s a snippet of what I modified in the RSS file:

$code = $tmhOAuth->request(
‘GET’,
//$tmhOAuth->url(’1.1/statuses/home_timeline’),
$tmhOAuth->url(’1.1/lists/statuses.json?slug=mylistslugname&owner_screen_name=myscreenname’),

….I’ve obviously replaced “mylistslugname” and “myscreenname” with the appropriate values, but it still doesn’t work. Also, I’ve tried passing the “list_id” name/value, but that still gives me the same error message. Wondering if it’s my code, or if lists are just borked right now. Thanks.

Reply ↓
Geoff on May 11, 2013 at 3:51 pm said:

Have you tried

$code = $tmhOAuth->request(
‘GET’,
$tmhOAuth->url(’1.1/lists/statuses’),
array(
‘slug’ => ‘mylistslugname’,
‘owner_screen_name’='myscreenname’,
)
);

Reply ↓
- Garrett on May 15, 2013 at 12:37 am said:
  
  That worked! Thanks so much Geoff…your tutorial and extra help are much appreciated (esp. since there isn’t any documentation on a lot of this stuff). Well, nothing that an avg Joe like myself can decipher anyways. Cheers!
  
  Reply ↓

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Creating an RSS feed for your Twitter home page

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