Posted Tue, 09/09/2008 - 09:07 by metarobert
I'll be spending some time rewriting BeTwittered. I'm liking the term "overhaul" better than rewrite, because I'll be reusing large chunks of code. I've made this decision because the presentation layer and the server side stuff were really muddied up. That's due to the fact that I was learning web programming, Apache, CSS, Javascript and PHP as I went.
Posted Fri, 08/29/2008 - 16:40 by metarobert
Sadly, I finally had to give in. I got my bill for the server and bandwidth costs. It surprised me to see that the continued growth of
BeTwittered pushed me over my 1 Terabyte net traffic allowance. I'll have to pay for bandwidth on top of the normal charge for the server. I hated to do it, but I've put adsense ads at the bottom of the gadget, below the timeline. I need to find an effective way to recoup the costs, adsense doesn't appear to be it. I guess I'll find out over the next week. I also found o
Posted Mon, 08/18/2008 - 11:17 by metarobert
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...
Posted Sun, 08/10/2008 - 16:22 by metarobert
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
Posted Thu, 07/24/2008 - 16:08 by metarobert
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.
Posted Thu, 07/24/2008 - 15:34 by metarobert
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 so
Posted Sun, 07/06/2008 - 02:23 by metarobert
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.
Posted Thu, 05/29/2008 - 07:34 by metarobert
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.
Posted Fri, 04/04/2008 - 09:25 by metarobert
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.
Posted Sun, 03/16/2008 - 14:14 by metarobert
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.
