This script will create an image on the fly of a users most recent twitter message.  It could be used as an email or forum signature or any place that allows you to embed a custom image such as on a blog or website.

I saw a website that did this the other day and wanted to try to duplicate the functionality.  Turns out it was pretty trivial even for someone with very little PHP experience. So I felt inspired enough to create a new website based on this script and called it TwitSig.us. Check it out.

It creates images something like this:

And here’s the code that does it:

<?php
include "twitter.php"; // from http://twitter.slawcup.com/twitter.class.phps
 
$t = new twitter();
$res = $t->userTimeline($_GET["user"], 1);
 
$my_img = imagecreatefrompng ( "base.png" );
 
$grey = imagecolorallocate( $my_img, 150, 150, 150 );
$red = imagecolorallocate( $my_img, 255, 0,  0 );
$text_colour = imagecolorallocate( $my_img, 0, 0, 0 );
 
if($res===false){
	imagestring( $my_img, 4, 30, 25, "no messages at this time",
	  $text_colour );
} else {
	$newtext = wordwrap($res->status->text, 65, "\n");
	imagettftext( $my_img, 10, 0, 10, 35, $text_colour, "Arial.ttf", $newtext);
	imagettftext( $my_img, 10, 0, 90, 15, $red, "Arial Bold.ttf", "@".$_GET["user"]);
	imagettftext( $my_img, 10, 0, 225, 15, $grey, "Arial.ttf", strftime("%a %d %b %H:%M %Y", strtotime($res->status->created_at)));
}
 
header( "Content-type: image/png" );
imagepng( $my_img );
?>

To get this script working for yourself you’ll need to make sure that you have the two font files and the base.png file for the background image that the text is put on.

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Technorati Tags: php, programming, scripts, Software, twitsig, twitter, web development

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