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Anatomy of a Twitter Replacement

Twitter seems to be all-the-rage in the tech circles these days. When I was trying to find an easy way for Monica and me to update Katie Lynn’s website, I decided to give Twitter a try. It worked well usually, but I noticed the external javascript calls slowed down page load time dramatically. Additionally, customization ability is lacking. I loved being able to send a text message to update the site, but I wanted the ability to email updates as well.

So I set out to find a replacement. I thought that would be simple.

Boy was I wrong.

I searched for a long time and finally found some very basic framework. Luckily, I’m not too shabby with PHP and was able to write everything I wanted:

• Accept text messages, emails, and web submissions.
• Parse the text message/email into variables.
• Insert the variables into a MySQL database.
• Display records any way I want.
• Allow people to subscribe to receive an email upon a new update.
• Load fast!

I then wrote an extremely easy admin interface to be able to edit the entries.

There are five main files to the application:

• Parser – as the name indicates, it parses the text and email submissions.
• Admin – all admin functions including posting via web.
• Notifier – emails subscribers upon all new updates.
• Subscribe – as indicated, performs the subscription action as requested by the visitor.
• Unsubscribe – as indicated, unsubscribes a subscriber upon their request.

The beauty of my system is that it does not need a cronjob. Instead, I simply piped an email address to the parser script’s full path.

And voilà!

I have a nice, simple Twitter replacement.