I started to try and break the 10 charset limit of PHP non-alpha after @InsertScript showed me that PHP Dev supports [] syntax for arrays. I wondered if it would be possible to break the limit within production PHP. At first I thought you could but then after some testing I found that there was no way to concat without "." and no way to call a string as a function without $ and =. However since I got into PHP Non-alpha again I thought why not try and improve it and make the code tweetable.

He works through the whole process of his discovery - starting with the creation of a non-alpha version of "0" (zero), moving into letter creation and finally all the way up to a full word..."assert". The result is tweetable code that echoes that string and contains more symbols than letters. If you're interested in more of this non-alpha kind of coding, check out some of the other posts on his blog.

Yesterday an ex colleague tweeted something that captured my attention, so I started thinking to a Twitter-powered code golfing competition. Looking for other examples.

Tweets included in the list are snippets like:

• A dependency injection container
• A super simple web framework
• A microframework
• Bypassing array_intersect

There's some game rules included in the post so you can contribute your own to the the comments. Several have already been added including a base64 encoding variant and getting the extension of a file.

GrUSP is organising a tweet contest and its prizes will be two tickets, one for each conference. The contest will start today (March 29th) at 1pm CEST and will end April 1st at 7pm CEST.

Anyone can enter - all you have to do is tweet a post with a few things: the "#grsup" hashtag, a mention of the twitter accounts for the events, a link to the conference site and something about the event. Be sure and get those tweets posted before April 1st a 9am CEST - they'll pick the winners soon after! (Oh and multiple entries are accepted so the more you tweet, the better your chances!)

Welcome back to Understanding OAuth - Tweeting from Scratch. This is Part 2 of the two-part series and picks up right where we left off in Part 1 with your returned Access Credentials. Since obtaining the credentials is the grueling part of the process, there's not much more left to do except posting a tweet on the user's behalf. Hopefully you'll find the final steps to be a lot easier to follow and more fun to implement.

They show you how to store the credentials from Part 1 into your session for safe keeping and include a simple form you will use to send a tweet to Twitter. They choose to manually build the HTTP POST request, including the credential headers along with the payload (oauth_consumer_key, oauth_signature, oauth_token, etc).

This idea was not my own, but was inspired by Twitto. During some extreme boredom at work I decided to "one-up" this teeny-tiny framework and improve on it. My framework does this by allowing you to run Controller files and methods in a similar way to CodeIgniter, while Twitto only has the ability to run functions from a single file.

He includes both the code for the "framework" and an example of how to create a simple controller class to work with it. He also shows how you can get a bit more MVC with it by adding in a view layer.

Twitto is the smallest and fastest PHP Web framework, and the first one to use the newest features of PHP 5.3. Packed in less than 140 characters, it fits in a tweet! Despite its size, Twitto is bundled with a default controller, is E_STRICT compliant, and generates an error if you try to access a controller that does not exist.

It was developed by Fabien Potencier (of symfony framework fame) as a part of the 140 Characters Webapp Challenge

I recently got an email from a reader asking me if I could help them with a small script to post updates to a Twitter account using PHP. I figured this might be something that a few others might be interested in, so I decided to post about it.

His script opens a connection to the "twitter.com/statuses/update.xml" file and posts the username, password and contents of the tweet. If it returns a 200 code (the HTTP "Success" code), then all is well and it was posted. Of course, this simple script is just a start - he recommends other things to add like more input validation, making it into a class rather than procedural and adding in some Javascript to check the length of the tweet.