Getting users latest tweet with Django - django

Question

I want to create a function which grabs every users latest tweet from a specific group. So, if a user is in the 'authors' group, I want to grab their latest tweet and then finally cache the result for the day so we only do the crazy leg work once.
def latest_tweets(self):
g = Group.objects.get(name='author')
users = []
for u in g.user_set.all():
acc = u.get_profile().twitter_account
users.append('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/'+acc+'.rss')
return users
Is where I am at so far, but I'm at a complete loose end as to how I parse the RSS to get there latest tweet. Can anyone help me out here? If there is a better way to do this, any suggestions are welcome! I'm sure someone will suggest using django-twitter or other such libraries, but I'd like to do this manually if possible.
Cheers

Answer 1

why redo the stone?, you can download/install/import python-twitter and do something like:
tweet = twitter.Api().GetUserTimeline( u.get_profile().twitter_account )[0]
http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/
an example: http://www.omh.cc/blog/2008/aug/4/adding-your-twitter-status-django-site/

Answer 2

Rss can be parsed by any xml parser. I've used the built-in module htmllib before for a different task and found it easy to deal with. If all you're doing is rss parsing though, I'd recommend feedparser. I haven't used it before, but it seems pretty straight forward.

Answer 3

If you go with python-twitter it is pretty simple. This is from memory so forgive me if I make a mistake here.
from django.core.cache import cache
import twitter
TWITTER_USER = 'username'
TWITTER_TIMEOUT = 3600
def latest_tweet(request):
tweet = cache.get('tweet')
if tweet:
return {"tweet":tweet}
api = twitter.Api()
tweets = api.GetUserTimeline(TWITTER_USER)
tweet = tweets[0]
tweet.date = datetime.strptime(
tweet.created_at, "%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y"
)
cache.set( 'tweet', tweet, TWITTER_TIMEOUT )
return {"tweet": tweet}