Twitter Tools Plugin Problem Solved

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been having some problems with Twitter Tools . For some reason , after I upgraded Wordpress to 2.8.6 the plugin stopped working . Whenever I tried to test my user ID and password I got this message :

” Sorry, login failed. Error message from Twitter: Rate limit exceeded. Clients may not make more than 150 requests per hour.” .

So I upgraded WP to 2.9.1 , reinstalled the plugin and tried again …. with no luck . I Googled the message and found out that I wasn’t the only one with this problem. Those solutions didn’t work so I uninstalled the plugin (again) and tried an earlier version . This didn’t work either . I started looking for other solutions . This one didn’t work because of my server’s settings , but I found CSS Trick’s “Build your own Social Home” post. They’ve used Twitter’s API and a bit of JSON to load and display tweets on the page.

This is the code I use to display tweets on my home page . It’s basically the same , with some small changes.

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
		$.getJSON('http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/iacobionut.json?count=2&callback=?', function(data){
		$.each(data, function(index, item){
			$('#twitter-home').append('<div class="tweet"><p>' + item.text.linkify() + '</p><p><em>' + relative_time(item.created_at) + '</em></p></div>');
		});

	});
function relative_time(time_value) {
	  var values = time_value.split(" ");
	  time_value = values[1] + " " + values[2] + ", " + values[5] + " " + values[3];
	  var parsed_date = Date.parse(time_value);
	  var relative_to = (arguments.length > 1) ? arguments[1] : new Date();
	  var delta = parseInt((relative_to.getTime() - parsed_date) / 1000);
	  delta = delta + (relative_to.getTimezoneOffset() * 60);

	  var r = '';
	  if (delta < 60) {
		r = 'a minute ago';
	  } else if(delta < 120) {
		r = 'couple of minutes ago';
	  } else if(delta < (45*60)) {
		r = (parseInt(delta / 60)).toString() + ' minutes ago';
	  } else if(delta < (90*60)) {
		r = 'an hour ago';
	  } else if(delta < (24*60*60)) {
		r = '' + (parseInt(delta / 3600)).toString() + ' hours ago';
	  } else if(delta < (48*60*60)) {
		r = '1 day ago';
	  } else {
		r = (parseInt(delta / 86400)).toString() + ' days ago';
	  }

	  return r;
	}

	String.prototype.linkify = function() {
		return this.replace(/[A-Za-z]+:\/\/[A-Za-z0-9-_]+\.[A-Za-z0-9-_:%&\?\/.=]+/, function(m) {
			return m.link(m);
		});
	};

});
</script>

I still have no idea why Twitter Tools doesn’t work , but this solution is really easy to use if you have the same problem.