jQuery Twitter ‘mini’ plugin

Here’s a little jQuery plugin for displaying a twitter feed into a web page.

The goal was to put my latest ‘tweets’ on my blog, and also learn jQuery.

Ended up making a ‘mini’ jQuery plugin that can easily be added into any web page.

Demo:

For the code:

$(function() {
  $('#tw').click(function() {
    $('#tw').twitter({'user':'al3xandr3','count':2});
  });
});

How It Works

It makes an Ajax request to twitter that returns json data of the feed. That data is then read and injected into the selected html element(s).

See in:

$.ajax({
  url: "http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/" + settings.user + 
       ".json?count="+ settings.count +"&callback=?",
  dataType: 'json',
  success: function (data) {
    $this.html(""); //clean previous html
    
    $.each(data, function (i, item) {
      
      //text
      $this.append("<p id=" + item.id + ">" + 
                   replaceURLWithHTMLLinks(item.text) + 
                   "</p>");

      //date
      if (typeof prettyDate(item.created_at) !== "undefined") {       
        $("<div><a style='font-size: 80%;' href='http://twitter.com/" +
          settings.user + "/status/" + item.id + "' target='_blank'>" +
          prettyDate(item.created_at) + "</a></div>").appendTo("#" + item.id);
      }
    });}
});

jQuery is a very nice designed lib, simple and powerfull. Some say its just like a functional programming Monad.

Full source code is available from github: http://github.com/al3xandr3 /jquery-twitter-plugin