Comments on: Archiving Tweets: A Simple Way to Use PHP, MySQL, and the Twitter API to Save Stuff

By: Barak

Barak — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 02:21:09 +0000

Many thanks for this useful script,
For some reason the condition for the `for each` loop is not met with:
($stdClassResults->results as $item)
I`m getting “done”
but nothing is inserted into the DB
Any idea ?
Thanks

By: Tanvi

Tanvi — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:13:14 +0000

Thank you so much! Will try it out!

By: JM

JM — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:15:05 +0000

The process of adding a crontab entry depends on your hosting provider. In general, the crontab format is:

minute hour day month weekday command

The timed execution of your script would be up to you, and would depend on the frequency of the term(s) you’re tracking (keeping in mind the search limits based on number of results and length of time; IOW, once a day would be adequate as long as there aren’t thousands of results in that one day).

So, once per day at say 6pm would be:

* 18 * * * command

“command” is the next part: if you have command-line cURL available on your system, the command would be:

curl http://yourdomain/pathtoscript

Using cURL to invoke http allows you to keep the script as-is with regards to the GET query string, although it might simply be easier (if this is the only term you’d be tracking) just to hardcode the values. Similarly, If you do not have access to commandline cURL but you have access to a PHP binary you would likely just hardcode the values and the command would be:

/path/to/php /path/to/script

(bearing in mind you can pass arguments on the command line but then would have to change the script anyway)

By: Tanvi

Tanvi — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:31:03 +0000

Thanks for this code! I was looking for somehting exactly like this. It works amazingly well! However, I do want automate it cos I want to track a few words over a period of several months. How can I add a cron job script to do so?

Much appreciated!

By: diamondTearz

diamondTearz — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:43:59 +0000

Thanks for posting this code snippet. It was a great starting point for a great idea and got me off to a good motivated start. Twitter here I come!

By: Working with APIs (part 1)

Working with APIs (part 1) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:33:10 +0000

[...] server-side scripting language at least to the extent that I describe in this how-to post regarding archiving tweets. But the Google Developer Resources provide many ways of accessing the various Google APIs without [...]

By: Twitter Trackbacks for Academic Sandbox (the blog) » Archiving Tweets: A Simple Way to Use PHP, MySQL, and the Twitter API to Save [academicsandbox.com] on Topsy.com

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:19:08 +0000

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By: Bookmarks for 08/10/2009 — MK Anderson

Bookmarks for 08/10/2009 — MK Anderson — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:05:56 +0000

[...] Academic Sandbox (the blog) » Archiving Tweets: A Simple Way to Use PHP, MySQL, and the Twitte… – [...]

By: JM

JM — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:00:35 +0000

Since this is just one table you don’t need a whole separate database for it. If you have a database on your host that you use for general or miscellaneous tables then you can just add this one table to that database. Then again if the only databases you have on your virtual host or server are for WordPress installs or other systems that create their own databases, you’ll have to create a general purpose database to put this table in it. If your virtual host includes a standard control panel like cPanel or its ilk, there’s probably a button that says “MySQL” that gives you the option to create a new database. Once created, that database would then appear in your administrative interface to MySQL, if you have one, like phpMyAdmin.

Once you have a database (and username and password for it) set up, you can issue the SQL query (shown in the post, the text that begins “CREATE TABLE tw_hashtag_search”) to create the table. If you are using an administrative interface to your database (such as phpMyAdmin) you just go to the “SQL” tab and paste the content of the query there and hit “go” (or “enter” or whatever the button says – I can’t remember). Then you’ll have a table, in a database, for the script to dump its stuff into.

By: Bill

Bill — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:56:51 +0000

Thanks so much for posting this (and for your other API posts)! Questions for us newbies: how do I create the database on my server? Do I save it as a particular file type and then upload it to a place on my server? If so, does it matter where I upload it? The only time I’ve created databases on my server is with a wizard which does it all for me. . . .

Thanks!