Setting Up Twitter Bots with OAuth

Dear Pietro,

I love Italy. Some of my best friends are italians.

Search for twitbot or twittbot and perhaps add feed. I found again something last night.

Tayeb
in sunny Portugal

Dear Abrtaham,

Since August 15th my script based on Masnun’s proposal does not update my twitter status. I checked with print_r as suggested and I am getting the following error:

stdClass Object ( [request] => /1/statuses/update.json [error] => Invalid / used nonce )

Any idea of why if it worked before?

Tayeb

Dear Masnun and Abraham,

I have solved the issue of my script not updating my twitter account. What I did was to investigate nonce error and its causes. It has to do with timestamp.

So as I wrote in my previous post my script was not updating twits as from August 15th. I thought that was odd at first, and I contacted Abraham directly by email asking him if there were any issues with his library, or if there are new Twitter arrangements, since Twitter was officially bringing down Basic authentication. Abraham may have not received my email or must have been quite busy ( he is under no obligation towards me, I must stress ) as he did not respond.

On visiting Masnun’s blog I read Abraham’s post in response to Paolo. I added to my script the following suggestion from Abraham to Paulo:

print_r($connection->post(‘statuses/update’, array(‘new status text here’));

and got the following error:

stdClass Object ( [request] => /1/statuses/update.json [error] => Invalid / used nonce )

So after posting here the error, I searched information on nonce error. and I learnt that there may be problems with timestamp.

Hence I ran the command in my server:

date

and in fact my server was 13 minutes behind.

Now twitter allows up to 5 minutes time difference, no more. So I ran the following command:

ntpdate pool.ntp.org

More on ntp servers at:

http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Servers/WebHome

My server was now in sync with ntp time servers and most likely with twitter. I ran my script and there at twitter account my latest feeds from my rss feeder were being diaplaed.

I have now established cron in my server to run every night and to put it into sync with ntp pool of servers.

Servers do lag behind in time. That’s what was was happening to my server.

May be this infomation may be useful to others.

Tayeb

Dear Abraham,

Thanks a lot for your follow up.

I am glad you didn’t make your suggestions and I figured out myself. There’s more fun in learning by investigating and doing it oneself.

Do give me the pleasure of meeting you and accepting a meal from me if you ever visit Portugal.

Tayeb

Thanks for the description, very useful! A couple of suggestions…

Maybe you should say a sentence or two more about setting up the application at Twitter, which you skip over. That form is a little baffling if you don’t know much about OAuth, so it would be useful to say something like “Set the ‘Application Type’ to ‘Client’ and ‘Default Access Type’ to ‘Read & Write’.”

It would also be useful to know how to test for an error after posting the status. For the PHP version, maybe something like:

$response = $connection->post('statuses/update', array('status' => "Hello Twitter OAuth!"));
if ($connection->lastStatusCode() != 200) {
print $response->error;
}

Although lastStatusCode() appears not to be working properly at the moment…

This blog post saved my life, thanks a lot man.

@Abraham thank you very much for your prompt reply and SORRY for the delay of mine 🙁

If I put in the status update script the code line that you told me does not happen anything 🙁

The script runs and at the end the web page remains blank/white: no error, no messages, no status update 🙁

I also tried to include a test for an error after posting the status (as suggested by @Phil Gyford) but the script page does not show any error: the page still remains white and no status update arghhhhhhhh >:(

Thank you in advanced for your kind help, have a great sunday

Paolo

@Abraham the code is exactly (copy/paste) the php script that maSnun shows in this post.

I also tried to create a twitter test account to obtain another “quartet” of keys (customer and access keys and secrets) but the result is still the same 🙁

Could be an hosting service problem?

Thank you in advanced for your help, have a nice day

Paolo

@Abraham if I use your lines code the script gives me back a Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘.’, expecting ‘)’

if I include the ….. between the single quotes ‘…..’ the script’s output is:

NULL int(0)

I hope this helps you … helping me 😉

Hello,

Have you checked your server’s hour if it is OK? Timestamp is a regular issue with json, though by the error it seems not to be the issue.

Tayeb

Glad you got it working. Yes, it is (after it happened) blatanly obvious that you had to fill in the empty spaces with your data 🙂

@Abraham: script tells me:

NULL int(0)

😕

@Abrham I guess so. I’ll try to check in my hosting control panel, otherwise I’ll ask to the hosting service support.

Thank you very much for your help!

Have a great Sunday 🙂

Hello,

I have tried oAuth method to update status to twitter. However, it only shows updated text when I do login to account on twitter. It doesn’t show tweet posted using PHP publicly. i.e If I write http://www.twitter.com/ without loging into to twitter it doesn’t show tweets updated using PHP script. But after logging into my account if I write http://www.twitter.com/ it shows all tweets I submitted using PHP

Please help.

Below is the code I have used to update status on twitter.

<?
include_once('lib/twitteroauth.php');

define('CONSUMER_KEY','’);
define(‘CONSUMER_SECRET’,”);

function getConnectionWithAccessToken($oauth_token, $oauth_token_secret) {
$connection = new TwitterOAuth(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, $oauth_token, $oauth_token_secret);
return $connection;
}

$connection = getConnectionWithAccessToken(“”, “”);
$content = $connection->post(‘http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/update.json’,array(“status”=>”Hello From PHP “,”include_entities” => 1,”trim_user”=>1));
?>