OKCOOL

We’re working on an exciting new web based management interface at the moment which we hope is going to make the lives of web developers and designers a lot easier. I can’t say too much about it now but I just wanted to quickly post about an interesting use I’ve found for Twitter.

As with most back-ends, our system has user accounts that need login credentials. One of the things I’ve always hated about managing users (Email, FTP, Web – doesn’t really matter) is trying to think of good strong passwords. So, I wanted to add a simple password generator to our user management system. I’ve done this many times before using word lists, random characters etc but this time, I thought I’d be a bit more new web about it!

Twitter exposes the public feed of the last 20 twits as XML or JSON (see the Twitter API doc) which is a great source of totally random content.

The idea behind the password generator is to take this feed, find 2 random words that are long enough and then put them together. I’ve chosen to also put some digits on the end for a bit of added security but that could easily be tweaked.

Take a look:

It’s actually quite addictive to see what password it might serve up next. As yet, there has been no potty mouth, but I can see that a bad word filter could be necessary.

The suggest link is just a bit of Ajax to call the server side method.

The only slight issue with the twitter public timeline is that it’s global, so you don’t know what languages might be contained within. To make sure I only pull back english words, I’ve just used a simple reg-ex on the XML feed which looks like:

preg_match_all('/ ([\\w]{5,15}) /i', $publicTwits, $words);

There’s something satisfying about getting other people to generate the passwords for me! Happy twitting!