Include recent tweets in a Rails app

download_twitter_feed.rake

#lib/tasks/download_twitter_feed.rake

desc "Download Twitter Feed"
task :download_twitter_feed do

  require 'open-uri'

   etag_cache = open( "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/system/etag_cache.txt" ).read

   begin
     open( "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/callannlane.xml", "If-None-Match" => etag_cache ) do |feed|
        open("#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/system/tweets.xml","w").write(feed.read)
        open("#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/system/etag_cache.txt","w").write(feed.meta['etag'])
        Rake::Task["remove_specific_cached_pages"].execute
        puts "File has changed." 
     end
   rescue OpenURI::HTTPError
     puts "No file available or file has not changed." 
   end
  
end

remove_specific_cached_pages.rake

#lib/tasks/remove_specific_cached_pages.rake

desc "Remove specific cached pages"
task :remove_specific_cached_pages do
  home_path = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/pages/home.html"
  File.delete(home_path) if File.exist?(home_path)
  puts "Cached pages removed."
end

twitterer.rb

# app/models/twitterer.rb

class Twitterer
  
  include HappyMapper
  
  element :id, Integer
  element :name, String
  element :screen_name, String
  element :location, String
  element :description, String
  element :profile_image_url, String
  element :url, String
  element :protected, Boolean
  element :followers_count, Integer
  
end

Due to changes with Twitter API, this no longer works.