Automatic Twitter status update - tweet script or cron job

[Rimy]

Hi, I need a script that would run as a cron job every 30-40 minutes and post automatic tweets  about 20-40 different default tweets so that it   can repeat. Can anyone here create such script? Thanks!

[phphelp]

Hi there. Here is the function that you can use to submit tweets to your twitter account:

PHP Code: [Select]


<?php
function tweet($message, $username, $password) {
  $context = stream_context_create(array(
    'http' => array(
      'method'  => 'POST',
      'header'  => sprintf("Authorization: Basic %s\r\n", base64_encode($username.':'.$password)).
                   "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n",
      'content' => http_build_query(array('status' => $message)),
      'timeout' => 5,
    ),
  ));
  $ret = file_get_contents('http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml', false, $context);
 
  return false !== $ret;
}
?>


To use this function, create file named for example post_tweet_to_twitter.php
In that file place the code above and call the function as shown below:

PHP Code: [Select]


<?php
  tweet('Tweet tweet tweet...', 'your_twitter_account', 'your_passw');
?>


You can add a task to your cron manager and set it up to run on required intervals. The command would be like shown below (using Lynx browser):

Code: [Select]

lynx -source http://www.yourwebsite.com/post_tweet_to_twitter.php > /dev/null