Disabling your Twitter background image cleanly

Something that’s frustrating me with the Twitter API is that there seems to be a useful piece of information missing when querying the API for a users settings. There’s a few different ways of pulling this info but http://twitter.com/users/show/ldnstreetlife.xml is as good as any for the purpose of showing you what I’m talking about. The feed contains all the users profile information so we can quite nicely replicate their design in our own app except one vital piece – there is no mention of whether or not the background-image has been disabled.

Whitelisted by the Twitter API

This was a very exciting discovery I made yesterday. I was on the Twitter API FAQ looking for exact numbers for the query rate limit when I noticed the following entry:
I keep hitting the rate limit. How do I get more requests per hour?
Just fill out this other handy form! Note that you must have a Twitter account and must be signed in as the account you want the rate limits raised for. Please also note that we only… approve developers for the whitelist.
It may take up to 72 hours for us to get back

Mashing up the Twitter API with PHP

<?php
$username = "youraccountname";
$password = "yourpassword";
$url="http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/londonstreetlif.xml";
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
$result = curl_exec ($curl); //remove space before parenthesis
curl_close($curl);
?>