To promote a website I created some time ago, I thought it would be nice to setup a Twitter account for that site. But how to get some followers? Follow the potential followers first! How to do that? Find tweets with keywords that relate to the site and follow those people, because they are probably interested in my site too 
.
For this I created a cakephp shell script that will do this magic. One limitation is that Twitter does not allow you to follow more than 2000 people unless you have ‘enough’ people following you back. But if your site is interesting enough, you will get followed back.
The code can be improved some more by storing some of the responses in a database, this will speed up the script when you get a lot of followers, maybe later when I have some time again I will add that feature. You need API access to Twitter, please consult the developer pages at twitter.com to learn more about that.
Note: there is a problem with the Twitter search API and the Twitter API, they do not use the same IDs for users, so it is not (yet) possible to do matching on userIDs, we have to use screennames instead, pitty because it slows things down.
So here is the code for the script:
class TwitterfollowShell extends Shell {
// Twitter user, password and screenname
private $user=’userIDforTwitterAccount’;
private $pass=’passwordForTwitterAccount’;
private $screen_name = “screennameForTwitterAccount”;function main() {
// $term contains the search words to find in recent tweets
$term = “twitter+OR+follow+OR+tweet”;
// Get followers
$cursor = -1;
$followed = array();
do {
$apiUrl = “http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends/”.$this->screen_name.”.json?cursor=”.$cursor;
$apiresponse = $this->callTwitter($apiUrl);
if ($apiresponse) {
echo $cursor.”\n”;
$json = json_decode($apiresponse);
$cursor = $json->next_cursor_str;
if ($json != null) {
foreach ($json->users as $user) {
$followed[] = strtolower($user->screen_name);
}
}
}
} while ($apiresponse && $cursor);
// Get blocked users and add them to the followed array
// $apiUrl = “http://api.twitter.com/1/blocks/blocking/ids.json”;
$blockedUsers = 0;
$page = 1;
do {
$apiUrl = “http://api.twitter.com/1/blocks/blocking.json?page=”.$page;
$apiresponse = $this->callTwitter($apiUrl);
if ($apiresponse) {
$json = json_decode($apiresponse);
if ($json != null) {
foreach ($json as $user) {
$followed[] = strtolower($user->screen_name);
$blockedUsers++;
}
}
if (count($json) == 20) {
$page++;
} else {
$page = 0;
}
}
} while ($apiresponse && $page);
// search some keywords !
$apiUrl = “http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=” . $term . “&rpp=100″;
$apiresponse = $this->callTwitter($apiUrl);
if ($apiresponse) {
$results = json_decode($apiresponse);
$count = 20;
if ($results != null) {
$resultsArr = $results->results;
if (is_array($resultsArr)) {
foreach ($resultsArr as $result) {
$from_user = strtolower($result->from_user);
if (!in_array($from_user,$followed) ) {
$apiUrl = “http://twitter.com/friendships/create/” . $from_user. “.json”;
$apiresponse = $this->callTwitter($apiUrl,true,”follow=true”);
if ($apiresponse) {
$response = json_decode($apiresponse);
if ($response != null) {
if (property_exists($response,”following”)) {
if ($response->following === true) {
echo “Now following ” . $response->screen_name . “\n”;
$followed[] = strtolower($response->screen_name);
} else {
echo “Couldn’t follow ” . $response->screen_name . “\n”;
}
} else {
echo “Follow limit exceeded, skipped ” . $result->from_user.”(“.$result->from_user_id . “)\n”;
exit;
}
}
}
} else {
// Already following
echo ‘.’;
}
}
}
}
}
}
function callTwitter($apiUrl, $post=false, $postFields = null) {
$ch = curl_init($apiUrl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $this->user.”:”.$this->pass);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
if ($post) {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
}
if ($postFields) {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$postFields);
}
$apiresponse = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $apiresponse;
}
}
?>
Oh my o my… This has cost me hours/days. Maybe it’s easy if you’re a long term CakePHPer. But I just started developing with this framework, also never used anything like an MVC framework before. Ok, I know how to do databases, php, javascript,etc… But this is something else. The basics of CakePHP are quite easy to understand and use. Simple stuff like you read in the tutorials: a user has posts, a post has comments. These are all hasMany and belongTo relations, those just work fine when doing pagination. But then you have something like Posts have Tags. Then you get into the hasAndBelongsToMany (HABTM) arena, where the ‘fun’ begins… With just to tables and doing a findAll or paginate is still not all that complicated. (by the way I’m using nightly builds of the 1.2 version).
