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Basic Twitter Reader

Here you can find updated information about Basic Twitter Reader ActionScript version 2 and 3.

Most common issue for both AS2/3 versions

If you can view your tweets once, then you reload the page and no tweets show, it is most likely a character encoding issue. This is mainly the case if you are using special characters, foreign symbols.

In the new releases on FlashDen there is a new solution to correct this. You will need to navigate to the php folder, then to Lib and open Check.class.php. At the top of the file you will see the following - 

                Check::$hash->set("Ë", "Ë");
Check::$hash->set("Ã", "Ã");
Check::$hash->set("«", "«");
Check::$hash->set(" ", " ");
Check::$hash->set("€™", "");
Check::$hash->set("â", "â");
Check::$hash->set("š", " ");
                Check::$hash->set("section1", "section2");

What this segment of code does is stores the characters that are causing issues. If you find a new html entity or character that is causing issues, which you can find out if you browse in your browser to output.xml it should tell you the line and column numbers the html entity or character is at. You create a new line and type the same as above, but putting the html entity or character in the first section and a space in the second section. The highlighted section is an example, replace section1 and section2 with the appropriate characters. If you need to know what the html entity really is, you can do a search on this table.

Next, scroll to the very bottom of the Check.class.php and find the following - 

                Check::$reg = new EReg("(Ë|Ã|«| |€™|â|š|section1)", "gi");

Add the html entity to the end, in the position of section1 as highlighted. Make sure to put the pipe characet | before each new html entity you add.

New Additions

Both the Basic Twitter Reader AS2/3 have a new sections added to them, called Author Support. What this means is when a user right clicks on Basic Twitter Reader they will see three custom menus, one linking to the product page, one to my blog and another to my FlashDen profile page.

The AS3 version has an xml section that allows you to enable/disable this feature, but its highly recommended to leave all settings as they are :D

The AS2 version has an enable/disable variable at the top of the script under the Author Support heading, but its highly recommends to leave all settings as they are :D

Alternatives :

AS2 - if embedding or dynamically loading this file into another flash movie, an alternative to changing the file paths in the checkpath.php is to add “this._lockroot=true; - Thanks to freshMint for pointing this out.

Problems :

Seen in AS2 and AS3 version, rare error of no tweets showing up, but output.xml file is being created. Check output.xml file for ' acirc; ' and delete it. There may be more than one in the output.xml file. This rare bug appears on some servers and not on others.

Missing Tweets :

Some people are reporting some of there tweets not showing up, but appearing on their Twitter home page, this isn't caused by the Basic Twitter Reader, this is caused by Twitter its self, as it cant keep up with updating its API version, so it drops some peoples tweets, this is random, so might effect you or not. You can go to search.twitter.com, click Advanced search and then enter your user name in the user name field, this will display the tweets that the Basic Twitter Reader gets.

A more recent change by Twitter is that they only store the last 7 days worth of your tweets which can be searched. The Basic Twitter Reader will start to store the tweets when they come available.