I’m building a network of sites and upon the provisioning of a new site, I’d like to have a Twitter Search widget displaying tweets from a hashtag search relevant to the site name shown in the sidebar.
For example, if a new network site is provisioned at ilovetwitter.network.com, there would be a Search widget in the sidebar displaying tweets for #ilovetwitter.
What would be a good way to create to Twitter widgets automatically upon new site provisioning?
Here are some of the solutions I’m considering:
- Use a web test framework such as SimpleTest to automate the widget creation and widget id extraction via the Twitter website. Unfortunately this is fragile and Twitter imposes a limit of 100 widgets which is too low. I guess I could create multiple accounts but that will be messy to manage.
- Ingest searched tweets in a local DB and create a widget myself. I like this approach however the Twitter API rate limiting is a concern since I’ll be searching for tweets frequently and the number of sites will be > 10,000. Again, I could create a bunch of accounts but that seems messy as well.
Ideally, I’d prefer creating new widgets via an API call however that doesn’t seem to be possible. Ideas?
