I still wasn’t happy with using jQuery for the rotation so I decided to have a play with a php class for generating animated gifs. I eventually got this working after several hours.
A 140 character post took around 3 seconds to generate and put a significant load on the server so I added a cache feature that stores a copy of the gif to be served untill my latest tweet changes and it generates a new one. The only problem now is the filesize of the gif and the rather hacky layering of images.