A quick way to get your Twitter followers counter in Ruby (designed for Rails application), with cache system and error handling.

twitter_counter.rb

require 'open-uri'
require 'json'

def get_twitter_counter
  url = 'http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=fdevillamil'
  cache = File.join(Rails.root, "tmp", "twitter_counter")
  
  return File.read(cache) if File.exists?(cache) && (Time.now - File.mtime(cache)).to_i < 7200

  begin
    open(url) {|http| @json = JSON.parse(http.read)}
    File.open(cache, 'w') {|f| f.write(@json['followers_count']) }
  rescue 
    return 0
  end

  return @json['followers_count']
end