Chris Herring

I’ve just added a little twitter ticker flickr thing on chrisherring.co.uk which looks at my Twitter posts and fetches related Flickr image. A while ago I created a Twitter badge in flash for an indies band website, only to find 3 weeks later Twitter changed their api due to a security issue. Later I re-created the Twitter badge in Jquery using JSON. For this little project I decided to use JSON as my data format, which can be parsed in AS3.

Looping through my recent Twitter posts I search for question marks or full stops etc with a regular expression which looks like this /\!|\?|\.|\…|\*/. Upon finding a matching character I extract the preceding word, and query the Flick api for images tagged with the preceding word, then place the tagged image in the background. In order to work around the security issue which arises when using Twitter and Flash, I use php to quickly copy my json feed and parse the local copy into flash. Below are some examples