Create Real-Time Twitter Banner using Node.js

The post walks through building a Twitter banner that updates every 60 seconds with the profile images of the three most recent followers. It shows how to get Twitter API access, prepare a 1500x500 banner, fetch followers, download their images, composite them onto the banner, and upload the result back to Twitter.

Reading notes

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• Create a Twitter developer account, make a new app, switch the app to read and write, and collect the API key, API secret, access token, and access token secret.
• Prepare a 1500x500 banner image with Headers.me or Canva.
• Create an index.js file, run npm init -y, and install twitter-api-client, fs, jimp, and axios.
• Load the packages with dotenv, twitter-api-client, axios, fs, and jimp.
• Set up the Twitter client with the API key, API secret, access token, and access token secret.
• Test the connection by calling followersList with screen_name and count: 3 and logging the returned users.
• Comment out the test code after confirming it works.
• Define a download_image function that uses axios to stream an image to a local file.
• Define a drawImage function that reads the banner and three follower images with Jimp, composites the avatars onto the banner, writes the final image, converts it to base64, and uploads it with accountUpdateProfileBanner.
• In start(), create an image_url array and a lastDrawImage timestamp.
• Fetch the latest three followers, unshift each profile image URL into the array, download the three images, and call drawImage when enough time has passed to avoid rate limits.
• Delete the downloaded images after updating the banner.
• Call start() once and repeat it with setInterval(..., 6000) so the process keeps running.
• The post says the code can be kept running or deployed on Heroku, and links a GitHub repo for reference.