OK guys, I am really tickled to have finally worked out a reasonable understanding of how to use Abraham's Twitter Oauth for making automated status updates. You're right, it is easy. And it's fun! Thank you, thank you, Abraham, for making this available!!!
For anyone else who may be struggling with how to move from PHP curl/basic authentication to Oauth, here's a quick tip: Focus on Abraham's test.php file. Register callback.php as your app, but load test.php in your browser. COMMENT OUT everything in the script that doesn't interest you, because it will create/alter/delete everything in your twitter account. (I had to comment stuff out because I was unable to create a test account.) Edit config.php At Twitter.com go to your apps listing and retrieve your consumer key and consumer secret. Click on the My Access Token button to get your access token and access secret. I'll paste a very stripped down version of test.php below, in case this is helpful to anyone. After edited with your keys and tokens, then loaded in a browser, this will post status updates. ?php /** * @file * */ /* Load required lib files. */ session_start(); require_once('twitteroauth/twitteroauth.php'); require_once('config.php'); session_start(); $_SESSION['access_token'] = 'YOURACCESSTOKENSTRING'; // store session data session_start(); $_SESSION['oauth_token_secret'] = 'YOURACCESSTOKENSECRET'; // store session data /* If access tokens are not available redirect to connect page. */ if (empty($_SESSION['access_token']) || empty($_SESSION['access_token']['oauth_token']) || empty($_SESSION['access_token']['oauth_token_secret'])) { header('Location: ./clearsessions.php'); } /* Get user access tokens out of the session. */ $access_token = $_SESSION['access_token']; /* Create a TwitterOauth object with consumer/user tokens. */ function getConnectionWithAccessToken($oauth_token, $oauth_token_secret) { $connection = new TwitterOAuth(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, $oauth_token, $oauth_token_secret); return $connection; } $connection = getConnectionWithAccessToken("YOURACCESSTOKENSTRING", "YOURACCESSTOKENSTRING"); /* Get logged in user to help with tests. */ $user = $connection->get('account/verify_credentials'); $active = TRUE; function twitteroauth_row($method, $response, $http_code, $parameters = '') { if (!is_string($response)) { $response = print_r($response, TRUE); } if (!is_string($parameters)) { $parameters = print_r($parameters, TRUE); } } /* statuses/update */ $parameters = array('status' => 'YOUR STATUS UPDATE HERE MUST BE UNIQUE'); $status = $connection->post('statuses/update', $parameters); twitteroauth_row('statuses/update', $status, $connection->http_code, $parameters);