Only Dreaming»Software

SuccessWhale is a web-based Twitter client written in PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. It’s a multi-column client that will work just the same in any browser – even IE6. (And as far as I know it’s unique in that respect.) You can also use it while on networks that block twitter.com. :) It’s free to use by anyone, has no advertising, and source code is available.

Visit SuccessWhale.com to try it out!

Features

• SuccessWhale has a three-column view, which by default shows your Timeline, your Mentions, and your received Direct Messages. At the bottom of each column is a drop-down menu that allows you to change the column to display a number of Twitter’s built-in feeds, plus your own Lists.
• SuccessWhale is integrated with my Twitter pastebin, Twixt. Enter a tweet longer than 140 characters into the box in SuccessWhale, and it will be piped through Twixt automatically, preserving your @users and #tags. SuccessWhale also displays the contents of Twixt posts inline, and expands short URLs.
• You can use SuccessWhale from places where twitter.com is blocked. To do so, you’ll have to log in from a computer that can see twitter.com first, then click “Cache Auth Token” in the top-right and set yourself a password. You’ll then be able to log in using that password from any computer.

Screenshot



Successwhale Screenshot (click for full size)

Status

SuccessWhale is complete, released software, and currently stands at version 1.0.1. It’s used by a small number of people including myself as their main Twitter client, and a number of sites around the internet have used the source code to integrate SuccessWhale into their own sites. As far as I’m aware it has no bugs, but if you find any or would like to request any new features, you can contact me on Twitter (I’m @tsuki_chama), or via my contact form. If you’d like to submit bug reports and feature requests directly into my Mantis server, please register an account and do so.

Licence and Source Code

SuccessWhale is licenced under the GNU GPL v3. You can download a copy of the source code here: SuccessWhale Source Code (ZIP).

This includes all the third-party code on which SuccessWhale depends, including twitteroauth, jQuery, the jQuery Form Plugin, the jQuery BlockUI Plugin and the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser. (Certain parts of the SuccessWhale download are thus licenced under the MIT licence, which is more permissive than and compatible with the GPL licence that SuccessWhale itself uses.)

Installation

To run your own copy of SuccessWhale, unpack the ZIP file on a web server that supports PHP and, optionally, MySQL. Edit config.php with your own settings.

As explained in config.php, you’ll need a Consumer Key and Consumer Secret – you’ll get those when you register your app with Twitter. Optionally, you can also enter details for a MySQL database. If you use a database, the app will remember users’ column setup, will cache expanded links (speeding up loads somewhat), and will allow users to cache their authentication tokens if they desire. The app will create all the tables for you the first time you visit index.php. If you don’t want to use a database, just leave “DB_SERVER” blank.

Then just navigate to index.php, log in with Twitter, and you should be up and running!

Thanks to…

• @abraham for writing twitteroauth, a PHP implementation of the Twitter OAuth API. SuccessWhale uses twitteroauth as its backend.
• @tikakino for the short URLs and Twixt expansion code, and for my introduction to jQuery.
• @aefaradien for hosting successwhale.com in the early days, and for many bug reports.