I am working on windows. I am building a twitter application which periodically checks for new tweets as well as allows users to update their status. I have written separate PHP files for reading (reader.php) and writing tweets (writer.php). The only problem is how do I periodically read the tweets. There are a few ways which I can think of -

1) Use a time-based job scheduler (like Cron) to periodically run the reader.php. How do I do this?

2) Use multithreading to run both reader and writer.php and use a timer function in reader.php

Suggestions?