meta_robert

JQuery vs Prototype (and Scriptaculous)

robert — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:17:06 +0000

This weekend, I did a partial rewrite of the Identica version of BeTwittered. I moved from using Prototype to using JQuery. I’m not actually a programmer, so take my opinion with a grain of salt: I really prefer JQuery. I feel more at home writing things like $(”#fieldID”).html(”Shiny, New HTML Content!”), and I really like the way that it allows for binding events. It just seems to work in a way more compatible with my disfunctional, possibly ozone damaging, thought patterns. I also have to say that the widgets that come standard in the framework seem to be better, and there are more available (compared to Scriptaculous, which builds on Prototype) It should be interesting as I get deeper in to the rabbit hole. If you are looking at the differences for yourself, you might also want to look at the differences between the AJAX stuff… JQuery gave me much more of what I wanted. The simple ajax “update” stuff is nice, and it I’m sure it helps throw quick little things together, but the core request API is more useful in jQuery. I dont recall the exact differences off of the top of my head, but a couple things I really like are “nocache” and “timeout” options. I no longer have to send a timestamp to keep the browser from giving me a cached ajax response, and having control over the timeout at the client end is crucial for a browser application.

I really would prefer to move straight to Sproutore, which is a much more comprehensive framework which is very “client app” oriented, but it’s just not quite ready for me; meaning it’s not quite done, but mostly that I’ve not figured it out enough yet. It’s not you, Sproutcore, it’s me! But I’m still working on it. When onitunes (sorry, I forget his real name, we only chatted on IRC) finishes up the in-browser GUI IDE, I’ll probably push hard to move to Sproutcore. That looks like a REALLY killer feature.

By the way, if you can think of a good name for an Identica client, I’m desperate! So far I’ve stumbled and have only iDentify, BeDented, and BeDentica. iDentify is OK. Any thoughts? Please help me!

Twitter Ping checks Twitter services

robert — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 03:22:06 +0000

I put a small service together on 32Hours to “ping” Twitter services. The services available to check Twitter were not helping me much, so I decided to write a little app that actually checks a few extra things:

1) Is Twitter is up (they all do this, but it’s not enough now that Twitter “degrades”)

2) Checks the Twitter service response (http response - 200’s are good)

3) How long it takes to connect to Twitter

4) how long it takes to finish the entire process of getting the public timeline.

If you’d like to have a look (close your eyes, it’s working, but not purty yet) it’s on 32Hours, the link is on the left under “Software / Gadgets”

Twitter identity controversy? Or a Betwittered Bug? Oy!

robert — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:08:13 +0000

I’ve gotten linked into a bit of a mess related to Twitter. It appears that a Twitter user named Tocaya posted a message, which then appeared as coming from another Twitter user, Louis Gray. Very bad news. The part where I come into the picture? BeTwittered was the source of the message. I have some investigating to do. Here’s a link to a thread discussing the issue.

Identi.ca Version of BeTwittered

robert — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:34:09 +0000

With all of the pain of the Twitter service outages and “brown outs,” people are searching for alternatives. A VERY promising alternative is identi.ca. Identi.ca is working toward API compatibility with Twitter. This doesn’t mean much to most people directly. It means a lot to Twitter client application developers, though. I decided to make a copy of BeTwittered that connects directly to identi.ca instead of Twitter. It took all of 5 minutes to make the basic changes required. This is NOT a trivial statement. There is some debugging and clean up to do so that my code doesn’t contain twitter references, but the damned thing just worked! So, indirectly this affects all twitter users. All of those nice little Twitter apps can be very quickly adapted and work on identi.ca. The importance of this goes one step further than might be readily apparent. Identi.ca is an intentionally open system in the sense that anyone can completely copy it and set up shop on the internet, and then connect to identi.ca. Open is good. Among other things, this means redundancy and less outage issues, no vendor lock in because they are compatible, and connections among systems so that your friends dont have to chase you from one vendor to the next if you find one you like better. (think about AIM vs MSN Messenger, vs Google Talk vs Jabber vs Yahoo messenger OR Facebook vs Orkut vs LinkedIn vs Myspace … you get the idea) My rant is done for now. I have to help make dinner!

UPDATE: BETA VERSION is now available on iGoogle at this link. The screenshot is still for a twitter gadget, and there are two useless tabs (favorites and directs) that I’ve just not taken out, but the gadget is working.

BeTwittered Beta Progress, PreBeTwittered.

robert — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 13:23:27 +0000

PreBeTwittered has come a long way this weekend. I actually got several hours to update it. I’ve changed the interface a bit. I also added replies, direct messaging. Everything seems to be working, even in IE, which can be a serious challenge sometimes. Because everything does seem to be working, I’ll probably put it into the production version (BeTwittered) tonight and start on some new features. Next up: paging back through tweet “history” and viewing your reply and direct message lists.

Twitter Infrastructure Sucks, and Sucks Bad.

robert — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:34:15 +0000

An interesting issue has begun to take the front seat for BeTwittered, our Twitter client for iGoogle. Load on a server is a simple problem. More load requires more CPU, RAM, bandwidth, etc. Very uncomplicated, yes? Now, ignoring other factors, like web server setup and optimization, other services running on the server, etc; what if we complicate this simple equation by throwing in a messaging application? Being ignorant in creating BeTwittered, it never occurred to me that I was creating a messaging application.
I was just creating a client to a messaging service (sure, call Twitter a micro-blog, and I do, but under the covers its a messaging app. It’s not a micro-blog hosting service. That would be easier.) The BeTwittered server gets thousands of requests to send and receive messages per hour. There are over 10k subscribers to BeTwittered, and more than 5k active every day. At current usage, it’s not too bad just handling the load, even with a fairly limited server. The problems get really ugly when Twitter gets slow, or goes down. That happens to be the better part of every day, lately. Instead of client requests coming in, being serviced, and closing, they are just are sitting open on the server. They wait, oh so patiently, as computers and programs can do so well, and slowly pile up and drag the server into a drooling, non responsive state. So, I say, BeTwittered infrastructure sucks, and sucks bad. The title wasn’t a typo, hang in there!
Scott (http://twitter.com/nintender) and I have discussed the solutions a bit. I have two at the moment:
1) Build a Twitter status program that steps in and cuts off communication to Twitter when it gets bad. It would simply check status regularly, and set a flag for the BeTwittered clients letting them know that there is a problem. This would theoretically reduce load by becoming the traffic cop and stopping clients from piling on when traffic gets bad.
2) Build a message queue for BeTwittered clients to submit to. this way there is limited number of communications agents running from BeTwittered to talk to Twitter. No pile up. The trade off would be speed during the heavy loads.
Option 1 is easy. That will probably go in really soon. Option 2 is more complicated, and will probably replace Option 1 when it’s ready.
So why is the title “Twitter Infrastructure Sucks, and Sucks Bad?” I really can’t know, but I can make an educated guess. Twitter appears to be suffering the same problems BeTwittered is suffering, but on a larger scale. With the knowledge I’ve gained writing BeTwittered and dealing with the unexpected popularity, I’m pretty sure that Twitter is now dealing with the same early mis-perception and the fallout that it caused. They didn’t think they were building a messaging infrastructure. Hence, their messaging infrastructure sucks like a turbo-charged shop-vac. No malice, I’m being sarcastic. I feel for them. They’re probably running hard right now trying to adjust.

Customized Webapps with Prism

robert — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:25:43 +0000

Here is a link to a LifeHacker story about Prism. Feature: Create Distraction-Free, Customized Webapps with Prism Prism really has my attention and imagination. I REALLY like how I can run BeTwittered as if it were a regular desktop application. There it is, floating about like a normal window on my desktop. No modifications required from the little web-app it really is. There are a couple issues I have, like lack of packaging things up like a regular, everyday application installer. Another is that web links open in a new Prism window, not my browser. I may find that there are simple solutions to these issues, I haven’t looked yet (tonight!) I look at Adobe’s AIR, and sigh. Sure, AIR has local system access to your PC, but I’m really not sure how big an advantage that is, and how long it will last. Plus, AIR is..well..Adobe proprietary, and probably brings a lot of crap and baggage. I have a hard time trusting Adobe. I mean, Acrobat reader is now something nearing a 20mb download. Holy crap! It’s supposed to be a READER! And why all the advertising baggage? And NO, I don’t want a photo album organizer with it. Quit asking! What the hell is that about? So, anyway, Prism looks nice. :^)

I Now Have a Partner in Nerd-Crime

robert — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:14:22 +0000

I’ve really had a lot of fun writing and updating BeTwittered.
I’ve found that just creating a bit of software that other people freely choose to use is very satisfying. I’m not a programmer in my day job, so I’m getting to learn a lot as I go, too. That’s all fun. But I recently gained a new friend, which is coincidentally benefiting BeTwittered and dovetailing right into the whole programming part of my life outside work. This should get really interesting as we’re very similar, but also complement each other well in the technical arena. Scott, if you are reading this and it sounds a bit mushy, don’t worry, I’m not going to get a couple of beers into me and do the whole “I love you man!” routine. Well, maybe I will because I’m really weird and I think it would be funny, but you have my permission to punch my eye or my mouth, but not both. Any don’t bend my fingers, I need those to type. And no hair pulling because that’s for sissy nerds and we’re “tough, manly nerds”

BeTwittered updates are live.

robert — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 15:37:54 +0000

I got a bit of a lesson this morning. I updated BeTwittered, and was very pleased. Well, until I noticed that the formatting was junk. What did I learn? Stylesheets get cached, and pretty liberally. So if you were using BeTwittered this morning, and it suddenly looked a bit clunky, my apologies. One interesting thing, IE was better than Firefox in this case. It surprised me that IE picked up the changes when I closed it and re-opened. Firefox was VERY stubborn… So, here’s the “official” notice.

A Couple Of Questions For You About BeTwittered.

robert — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 15:06:35 +0000

I need a bit of help. I’d like to make a couple of improvements to BeTwittered, but I have a couple of questions I need some feedback on. I’m wondering if you (if you use BeTwittered) would like me to add those “posted about 1 hour ago” type of timestamps to messages. I really like them, but I’m not sure how important they are to everyone else. I suppose I could just put them in as an option. Question for you, then: Would you rather have the timestamps on or off by default?

The other bit of help I need is from Mac users. I can test on Linux and Windows using Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera. Some of you (quite a few actually) are Mac users. Any information about BeTwittered from Mac users would be really great. What do you like about it? What is wrong with it for you? Does it look “nice”? If someone wouldn’t mind sending me a screen-shot, that would be very appreciated. I’d like to make sure it looks good for you, too.

You can comment here by clicking the “comments” link, just a bit down the page from here, before the next article. You can also use the link for feedback at the top of BeTwittered, or just send an email to codemonkey@32hours.com, which is the mailbox I use for BeTwittered communications.