I have an idea for a fun little service that relies on data from two web sources and needs to periodically check them for updates.
First, I need to check 30-40 twitter accounts every 5 minutes to look for new tweets.
If I detect a new tweet, I want to hit an existing (not mine) PHP address and see if that page has changed since the last time I checked it.
The problem is, my background is entirely in application development. I have no idea what technologies, languages, or frameworks I should look into.
I would really appreciate some advice on where to start.
Some notes that may or may not help - I develop on a Mac, and have used Xcode exclusively until now. I am happy to run the service/script/whatever locally during development but would like to host it eventually. My background is in Objective-C and other OO languages. I have no experience of developing against an API, web development, unix scripting, or anything else, but am ready for a challenge.
You can easily achieve this by setting up a cron job. Cron jobs are task that get periodically called, e.g. daily, weekly, even minutely.
If you want to do more than just checking those two addresses, e.g. display some web pages, I recommend you to use a web framework like the PHP Zend Framework.