Little snippet to grab tweets and store the json at maximum once an hour to avoid going over api limits. Does all this without cron so we use the log file to keep track of the last grab and the tweets.json stores the tweets for us.

_twitGit.php

<?php

$handle       = 'handle';
$count        = 24;
$url          = 'http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/'.$handle.'.json?count='.$count;
$lastGrabLog  = './lastGrab.log';
$twitGit      = './tweets.json';
$interval     = 3600;

if (file_exists($lastGrabLog)) {
    $lastGrab = file_get_contents($lastGrabLog);
    if (time() - $lastGrab >= $interval) {
	$tweets = file_get_contents($url);
	file_put_contents($twitGit, $tweets);
        file_put_contents($lastGrabLog, time());
    }
}

?>

lastGrab.log

0000000000

tweets.json

[
   { "tweet":"tweet" }
]