Scrolling Twitter Feed Using jQuery not working in school

[jimmyhotfingers]

I'm trying to display a scrolling Twitter Feed on my wordpress website using jQuery as described here:

How to Create a Scrolling Twitter Feed Using jQuery - AndreasLagerkvist.com

The demo is here:

Scrolling Twitter Feed

It works like a dream when not behind the school proxy/firewall. Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing? Is the demo working for you guys in school?

[PeteW]

Hi,

We have a simliar issue with Twitter apps on websites and it was to do with the Twitter API.
As we are sitting behind a proxy which is shared with a whole host of other schools, you are all using only a few external IPs. Twitter limits how many requests an IP can ask for information on the API and will then block any further requests for another hour. You get the same thing when tweeting from Apps such as Tweetdeck at home if you tweet a lot.

I think it is a 150 requests in an hour.

I am guessing this is the case.

P.S. I can see the example fine from here.

[jimmyhotfingers]

Thanks Pete. I think you are right. That ties in with my experience of it working behind the proxy once in a blue moon.

So how do sites like the BBC get round this? Do they have a chimp sitting there manually coding the tweets that show up regularly when they are covering an event?

[PeteW]

Now that, I don't know. They have probably got some agreement for lots of £££££/$$$$$$ to allow it. Good question though. Unless they actually HAVE chimps. Cheap labour with the current climite.

[jimmyhotfingers]

So how do you display tweets on your sites Pete?

[PeteW]

Well, I support schools, not actually from one.
Any school that has raised this, I have advised them there is not much we can do as it is down to Twitter blocking the requests, not the firewall/proxy. I'm not sure if any of them have resolved the issue.

Someone might comment and let us know.

[JonTorbitt]

You might find that school filtering systems (such as those provided by LAs or E2BN) block all calls to the Twitter site / API from both PCs and mobile devices regardless of whether it's from the browser or a dedicated app. i have been looking into this and you would need to put an exception rule in place to allow all calls to the twitter domain to force it to work. Just a thought...?

[ZeroHour]

One option would be to pull the api data on a 5 min schedule and dump it to a file, the twitter ticker would then point to the file.