Doug Brown has posted a quick tutorial showing how to use the cURL extension in PHP to send tweets off to the Twitter API.

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.