<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

Next we’re going to load the data from Twitter asynchronously. The following will do that:

<script type="text/javascript">
//Your twitter name
var twitter_name = "mikeluby";
//Number of tweets you want to get back
var twitter_count = 6;
//Callback function name
var callback_name = "tweet_callback";
//Twitter search url
var twitter_search = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline";
//Return type (json or xml)
var return_type = "json";
//Adds script tags to the head/body tag
( function() {
var ts = document.createElement('script');
ts.type = 'text/javascript';
ts.async = true;
ts.src = twitter_search + "." + return_type + "?screen_name=" + twitter_name + "&count=" + twitter_count + "&callback=" + callback_name;
( document.getElementsByTagName( 'head' )[ 0 ] || document.getElementsByTagName( 'body' )[ 0 ] ).appendChild( ts );
} )();
</script>

Ok you got the data now what? Let’s parse it and display it!

<script type="text/javascript">
//Call back function
function tweet_callback( data ) {
//Loop through the data from twitter
$.each( data, function( i, tweet ) {
//Make sure the text isn't undefined
if( tweet.text != undefined ) {
//Lets do some regex magic to replace urls, hashtags, and usernames
var text = tweet.text.toString().replace( /(\b(https?|ftp|file):\/\/[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%=~_|])/ig, '<a href="$1">$1</a>' ).replace( /(^|\s)@(\w+)/, '<a href="http://www.twitter.com/$2">@$2</a>' ).replace( /[#]+[A-Za-z0-9-_]+/ig, function(t) { var tag = t.replace("#","%23"); return t.link("http://search.twitter.com/search?q="+tag); } );
//Lets append each tweet to a ul with the id of tweet_container
$( "#tweet_container" ).append( "<li>" + text + "</li>");
}
} );
}</script>

There you go! The only limitation is if a user decides to visit the page (and make the twitter api calls) more than 100 times per hour.

For those who don’t know how to do a ul tag with an id:

<ul id="tweet_container"></ul>

Enjoy!

curl -u USERNAME:PASSWORD -d status="MESSAGE" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml | grep truncated