Embedding Twitter into a Uni website

[lavaexperiments]

Hi Folks,
I work at a large university. In an attempt to enhance communications I looked to embed a Twitter feed into pages within our website.
Sometimes the Twitter feed works fine. Other times the feed is completely empty apart from the Twitter logo and design.

One of our tech guys suggested that twitter only allows 150 connections before it blocks embedded feeds from an ip - because our machines all run through a cache so our ip’s look the same externally, hence the limit. With approx 15-20,000 folks on campus, that 150 limit is reached very quickly.

I’ve noticed this on my personal website when accessed at work - sometimes the Twitter feed works and other times it’s blank. However accessing off campus the feed is there all the time. Therefore, a Twitter feed on any web page is liable to be unaccessible if the user is on the campus network.

Does this make sense to others? Is there a work around?

Cheers,
Fraser

[argenisleon]

Hi fraser,

If the public ip is the same for all the computers int your campus probably you are reaching the limit of the twitter REST API.

I think you have two options. Use the REST API, call the the API every minute an save the content in a cache. When a user visit your page just load the cache.

Other option is to use the USER STREAM API to get you tweets in realtime, save the data in a cache and display the data from cache when a user visit your site.

Hope this help

Hope this help

[episod]

Like @argenisleon mentions, we recommend in scenarios like this taking a more robust approach – collect the tweets server-side and have your widgets pull from your own tweetstore instead.

[lavaexperiments]

Thanks Argenis and Taylor.
I’m not a developer so I’ll try and digest / read up on your comments.

Your suggestions - are they implementable by me (competency aside) or do I have to recommend changes to how our Uni servers are processing the information flow?

Cheers

[niall]