PHP and Twitter

[chasethemetal]

Hello!

 

I have a twitter button. But I would like to have a form button's action to activate the "tweet/share" link. Why? Because I want to record in mySQL database the fact that someone has in fact clicked the link to tweet. How I was thinking about doing... But really have no idea is like so.

 

<form action="tweet.php" method="POST">

<input type="button" name="tweet" value="ip address" />

</form>

 

then in the tweet.php

 

I would have php insert the gathered IP address (ive got this part working with a geocoder class) into the database as confirmation. Then the php code would execute the hyperlink / java which is this:

 

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="http://mycontent.com" data-count="horizontal" data-via="person-to-tweet-at">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

 

Activating the link as if someone where to click the link, but automatically.

 

Basically I am looking for a way to record who clicks the Twitter button. Any guidance on this topic would be much appreciated.

[Fadion]

I would go for another approach.

 

First, make the link to twitter go into a social.php page like this:

<a href="social.php?p=twitter">Follow me on Twitter</a>

 

Then make social.php

<?php
$social_sites = array('twitter', 'facebook', 'linkedin');
$site = $_GET['p'];
if (!in_array($_GET['p'], $social_sites)) { die('What were you thinking?'); }

$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; //or whatever u use to get the visitor's IP

$results = mysql_query("INSERT INTO social_clicks (site, ip) VALUES ('$site', '$ip')");

$url = "http://www.$site.com";
header("Location: $url");
?>

 

The script is very simple. Based on the "p" url parameter (passed by GET) it specifies what kind of social media the user wants to visit. It could be social.php?p=facebook for Facebook and so on. If the social media is correct (in the white list), you insert a row in the database with the right social media and IP, and finally redirect him to the correct url. It may certainly need some extra code, but it should give the general idea.

 

I assumed you needed a way to handle more than one social media (for scalability's sake), but if you want just Twitter, it can be easily modified.

[chasethemetal]

Thats a great idea. However I am really stumped because I know you can have php go to a url. But if you look at the <a href> tag there is all this crucial information inside it. It would be nice is for instance if you could do this with PHP

 

$url = ' "http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="http://mycontent.com" data-count="horizontal" data-via="person-to-tweet-at" '

 

I just can't seem to figure out a way for all of that class, and data tags to be automatically associated with the twitter link...