Eric Paul Snowden

Due to security changes by Twitter, Flash files not residing on the Twitter.com servers cannot directly access the RSS feeds of Twitter users. I’ve seen dozens of posts around the net regarding these changes and found a simple way to get around the restrictions using php. The issue – Flash cannot pull data from a server unless the server specifically allows it in its crossdomain.xml file. Whenever I am having trouble pulling data into Flash this is always the first place I look. There is a pretty simple workaround in php using a script as an intermediary so the Flash player’s security settings don’t kick in. Create a php file called “twitter.php” and point your Flash file to it exactly as you would the Twitter rss feed. Within the file, include the following code:

< ?php
$twitterFeed = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/22540123.rss';
$outputFeed = @file_get_contents($twitterFeed);
print $outputFeed;
?>

You will need to change in the variable twitterFeed to point to the Twitter RSS you want to parse. That’s it! This should work any time you are looking to pull RSS feeds from a server that doesn’t allow you to access it directly through Flash.