Work-around for IE Twitter badge bug

If you use the HTML/Javascript Twitter badge, you've probably noticed that it has issues under Internet Explorer. It will generally work the first time a user hits the page, but if the next time, the badge will not show a tweet list. Here is a work-around you can use if you have access to your blog's code.

Note: Unfortunately, you won't be able to do this if you're on Blogger, MySpace, Facebook or some other shared that doesn't allow you to write server-side code.

The problem is with the way IE handles caching. One quick way to work around this if you can write code on your site is to add a randomized parameter to the code that retrieves the JSON timeline.

For example, in PHP, you could do something like this:

In the badge code, change the following line:

to:

This causes IE to treat every request as new and not cache it.

Update: Good news for shared blog users! John Cosgrave has a pure Javascript version of this hack at the Twitter Get Satisfaction support site. Scroll down through the comments and look for John's version.

Update II: More good news! Twitter has supposedly fixed the problem on their end, so these hacks should no longer be necessary. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but other users report that it works.