Get a twitter count of your shared WordPress content without a plugin

If you run a blog that has an audience who regularly share your pages, why not show them the count of how many times your pages have been shared. Here’s how to get a twitter count of your shared WordPress content without a plugin.

function getTweetCount($url)
{
    $url = urlencode($url);
    $twitterEndpoint = "http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=%s";
    $fileData = file_get_contents(sprintf($twitterEndpoint, $url));
    $json = json_decode($fileData, true);
    unset($fileData); // free memory
    //print_r($json);
    return $json['count'];
}