Posting to Twitter using PHP snippet

[fumbler]

I found the following snippet today. I'm new to PHP and am trying to use this snippet to add a text area to a page on my site that posts to Twitter whatever I enter into the text area. This code seems perfect and it works, but lacks the actual html text area where I would enter the text to post. (instead it just has a default message on the $message = line) Where or how in your opinion would I enter that text area in this code below?

 

<?php

// Set username and password

$username = 'username';

$password = 'password';

// The message you want to send

$message = 'is twittering from php using curl';

// The twitter API address

$url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml';

// Alternative JSON version

// $url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json';

// Set up and execute the curl process

$curl_handle = curl_init();

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=$message");

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");

$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);

curl_close($curl_handle);

// check for success or failure

if (empty($buffer)) {

    echo 'message';

} else {

    echo 'success';

}

?>