One of my biggest issues with using PHP as the templating engine in View scripts is that the easiest way to echo a variable is the least secure. [...] So, I decided to leverage a post by Mike Naberezny from a while ago about streams. The idea is all his; I just modified it to work with Zend Framework's Zend_View the way I wanted it to.

His method uses a slightly different output format - instead of using a normal echo statement to push out the escaped output, it uses a special syntax using the "@" sign as a shortcut to the call to escape(). He includes the code you'll need to make it work in your ZF install and explain it a bit (including where the real key lies - in stream_popen).

What is it? It tracks the public timeline from twitter and picks up any links that get posted. It then follows each link to find final destination and then categorizes the content into blogs / video / images / audio. This project really shows what is possible using PHP if you know what you are doing.

Most of the work was done by another developer, Stuart Dallas as one of four that worked on the project together. It's written in PHP5 and uses only about 20 PHP files to get the job done. You can also check out the launch post over on tweetmeme's blog for more information on the service.