UPDATE: Plugin has been updated! For more up to date information read this post.
You might have noticed that I am talking and spending more time on Twitter lately. I have been helping Twitter users with their jQuery related questions and problems as well. If you are using Twitter and have some kind of jQuery related question I will be happy to help.
Anyway, after I found a Twitter JSON(P) API url last week, I spent some time playing with it and ended up with a jQuery plugin that when given a Twitter username retrieves and returns javascript object with user detials such as followers & following counts, full name, homepage URL, etc.
Download jQuery Twitter API - jTwitter here.
Update: Now plugin also get any number of any user's posts.
Here is an example of returned JavaScript object:
// Starting from version 1.1 plugin gets user posts // the returned object has changed. See update. { "screen_name":"jqueryHowto", "name":"jQuery HowTo", "description":"jQuery and javascript howtos, tutorials, hacks, tips and performanace tests. Ask your jQuery questions here...", "url":"http://jquery-howto.blogspot.com", "followers_count":294, "friends_count":120, "favourites_count":0, "statuses_count":154, "location":"", "id":26767000, "time_zone":"Central Time (US & Canada)", "profile_image_url":"http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/110763033/jquery_normal.gif", "notifications":false, "utc_offset":-21600, "following":false, "protected":false, "created_at":"Thu Mar 26 14:58:19 +0000 2009", "profile_link_color":"0000ff", "profile_sidebar_fill_color":"e0ff92", "profile_background_tile":false, "profile_sidebar_border_color":"87bc44", "profile_background_color":"9ae4e8", "profile_text_color":"000000" "profile_background_image_url":"http://static.twitter.com/images/themes/theme1/bg.gif", }
As you can see the jQuery Twitter API plugin returns Twitter user's avatar URL as well. Using this jQuery plugin you could create another plugin that would return Twitter user's avatar image.
You can see example usage and demo here.
Here is how to use jTwitter:
// I am query data for "jqueryHowto" user
$.jTwitter('jqueryHowto', function(userdata){
//Callback functn with the user data as shown above
$('#profile input.url').val(userdata.url);
$('#profile #avatar').html('<img src="'
+ userdata.profile_image_url + '" />');
});
The first parameter is a Twitter username and the second is a callback function that will be called after jQuery gets user details from the Twitter servers.