
I was perusing the Web looking for some quick and dirty Javascript I could use with the Twitter Search API to display a list of recent tweets containing a particular keyword. I came across the monitter.com widget, which was almost exactly what I had in mind, except that it includes some really great, rich features that were well beyond what I needed. I adapted and simplified the monitter script to:
- Fix an issue with unescaped characters, e.g. hashes, in the search query.
- Fix an issue with ampersands in links in the
linkify()
function. - Replace some deprecated HTML tags, e.g.
<b>
, and fix other XHTML validation issues, e.g. using self-closingimg
tag. - Fetch search results only once, rather than every few seconds (since Twitter sets a rate limit of 100 requests per-hour per-user, I found this to be necessary).
- Specify the number of tweets to return using an additional
class
. - Remove the fade-in effect.
- Hyperlink each user’s profile image to their timeline.
Just like monitter, TwitStream utilizes the jQuery framework. Because jQuery is awesome.