OK lets get started, what you’ll want to do first is to create a simple filter, I’ll be using the twitter-search publisher for this. So lets say you wanted to get all of the tweets that have the keywords “@mikeluby”, “mike luby”, and “mikeluby.com”. You would start by creating the filter, lets name it “aboutMikeLuby” next you’ll want to put the URL to your callback (lets use http://example.com/gnip_input.php). Finally at the bottom you’ll enter the keywords into the keyword input. This input is comma separated and will simulate an OR conditionals to the twitter search api. Now there is away to create these filters via code, I’ll get into this at a later date. When the activities are returned they are grouped into buckets, there is a new bucket every minute.

At this point you’ll want to make sure you have the Gnip PHP Convenience Library downloaded. (Get it here) In gnip_input.php (the callback when gnip “pushes” data to your service) you’ll have the following:

//This file is called every time Gnip has activities to publish to the current bucket.

include_once( "Gnip.php" );

$time = time(); //Get current time

$gnip = new Services_Gnip( $gnip_username, $gnip_password ); //Create gnip Object

$filter = $gnip->getFilter( "twitter-search", "aboutMikeLuby" ); //Create filter object

$results = $gnip->getFilterActivities( "twitter-search", $filter, $time ); //This returns a Services_Gnip Object of the activites in the specified bucket.

print_r( $results );

There you go, it’s pretty straight forward. Don’t forget to check out Gnip’s documentation.

< ?php
//tinyURL function, needs url to be passed to tinyrul
function tinyURL( $url ) {
	//Initializes a new session and return a cURL handle
	$curl = curl_init( );
	//Sets an option on the given cURL session handle.
	//request url
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=" . urlencode( $url ) );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 ); //return transfer
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10 ); // connection timeout
	//Execute the given cURL session.
	$tiny = curl_exec( $curl );
	//Closes a cURL session and frees all resources. The cURL handle, $curl , is also deleted.
	curl_close( $curl );
	//return result from curl
	return( $tiny );
}

echo tinyURL( "http://strategicv.com/" ); //echos: http://tinyurl.com/3r4j8c
?>