Is it better to display latest tweets on a webpage using the PHP API or Javascript?

Question

I want to display a user's latest Tweets on a webpage while maintaining the ability to style the Tweets with custom CSS and also maintaining good page load speed.

I have managed to display the latest Tweets in 2 ways.

1. Using the PHP Twitter library (by Aaron Brazell). By using this method, my PHP code has to wait for a response from Twitter before my page can be completed and sent to the client. This could cause the page load time to be quite unpredictable and more than likely slow down the page load enough to be annoying to users.

2. Using the Blogger Twitter Widget, the latest Tweets are loaded using JavaScript after the rest of the page has loaded. This way user's don't have to wait for Twitter response before they can view the page.

I would like to know if there are any other pro's and con's to using these different methods to display a user's latest Tweets, and also if there is perhaps another solution I can look into which will enable custom CSS styling and provide good page load performance?

Also, how do these 2 methods influence the way Twitter applies Rate Limiting? Using PHP I can cache the Tweets and therefore make fewer calls to Twitter, while using JavaScript this is not possible as far as I know?

Answer 1

You can have custom CSS styling in both ways, so this shouldn't be a problem

1. when using PHP api, try to cache all the info you need and put it in eg. Database (and query twitter every 5-10 mins., or run update script through cron - since I last checked there is a limit on queries in twitter you can perform on a specific time basis)

2. by using Javascript to update tweets you disable web spiders to index these tweets on your page (also disabled people usually don't have JS enabled... )

EDIT

Also note, that you will need more PHP coding to implement caching, but this is a very nice coding experience (on the other hand it is easy to implement a JavaScript script to fetch such things as updates from twitter)

Twitter API Rate Limiting

As read on twitter.api: Twitter limits REST requests to 150 requests/hour (using IP based rules or counting requests for authenticated API usage)

GET requests like fetching twitter feeds, timelines through rest api do count

POST requests like updating statuses do not count

Account rate limit status available at http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.format where you can check how many request you can do in specified time limit