I’ve reached some milestones in the past couple of weeks:

• Auto-reload works! And it even fixes itself when the network connection bugs out! (I used a heavily modified chunk of code from WPMayor.com, in case you were curious.)
• Auto-reloading broke the animations, so I created a solution for when that happens. In addition to reloading the tweets PHP file, I’m also reloading the animations javascript file too (at a much shorter interval to avoid any huge lapses in animation).
• All of these things have resulted in a smaller main page, so loading time is a bit better now too.
• An error message now comes up when there isn’t a response from Twitter.com, instead of a blank page. It explains why the tweets aren’t loading, and tells the user not to get trigger-happy with the refresh button (because there’s a limit to how many times they can refresh every hour). This message automatically goes away and is replaced by the type animation when the connection is restored.
• Automatic reloading is now limited to 120 times an hour (to comply with Twitter’s request limit, while still allowing the user to hit the refresh button up to 30 times if they get anxious). Unless they go nuts and hit the refresh button more than that, it should automatically reload every 30 seconds with no problem.

Here’s the new and improved version of my twitter experiment: http://erikagoering.com/t4-near-final/

And here’s what the error message looks like (it’s been removed in the live version for now because there’s a caching error with my server):

I still need to format a few more keywords and clean up some code, but the experiment itself is done and functional. Hooray!