Creating a tweet button without opening a new window

Question

I'm looking to add a "tweet this" button to a site. Simple enough, right? The catch is that the site is meant to run on an embedded platform that doesn't particularly handle popup windows, so I'm trying to do everything inside the page.

I'm able to successfully create my tweet button, attach an onClick handler to it, and construct a proper twitter.com/share URL for the relevant content. All works fine when I open that URL in a new window with window.open. However, if I try to open the URL in an iframe, nothing loads inside the frame. Even loading http://twitter.com into the iframe fails in the same way. However, loading Google or any other website seems to work just fine.

Any thoughts on what I'm missing here? Thanks! --zach

Edit: Yep, they are detecting the iframe on load and blanking the page:

if (window.top !== window.self) {
    document.write = "";
    window.top.location = window.self.location; 
    setTimeout(function(){ document.body.innerHTML='';},1);
    window.self.onload=function(evt){document.body.innerHTML='';};

}

Any reasonable way to get around this, or am I stuck writing my own auth pipeline through oauth? I don't need anything from their API, just letting users tweet to their own accounts.

Answer 1

Twitter (like Stack Overflow) is probably using some Javascript to ensure they're not being presented in an iFrame:

if(top!=self){
     //hates you
}

I ran into something similar recently, and ended up re-doing part of my app without the iFrame element.

Answer 2

Go and get a developper account on twitter and things are made easy for you :)