It's really kind of stunning.  What started out as a learning experience, and a bit of a hobby, got a lot more attention than I expected.  BeTwittered now has a couple of thousand subscribers.  It's been really pretty exciting to have put something together, and watch it's use grow.  Part of the fun is using Google analytics to see where everyone is from.  All over the world.  That might sound a bit naive, but even though I'm no newcomer to the internet and technology, it's still a bit stunning.  I suppose I'm just finding out how much I enjoy c

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 spent a bit of time this morning adding to my error handling in BeTwittered. Around 8am there was a bit of a service issue at, I believe, the Twitter server end, but I had no way to confirm it. I was, as my own customer, just getting my own "OOPS, something went wrong" please stand by sort of message. The problem is that I used the PHP file_get_contents() function, which does not return HTTP error codes, and when using Twitters HTTP API, that's key for error handling. To make a long story short: I discovered that, although the function does not return the HTTP status codes, that status DOES get stored in the global variable $http_response_header. Are you geeky enough to want to see how I captured this info? Then read on...

I'm really thinking seriously about getting an iPhone, but only for testing purposes, of course. I would never buy a cool gadget because I'm drawn to cool gadgets like a cat to the other side of the street. OK, so I do want one because they're cool. But I would really like to get my Twitter Gadget (BeTwittered) working on mobile phones, and I really think the iPhone would be a great platform for it. I've already got a large percentage of users on Mac's.

I've spent the better part of my rainy, Southern California Saturday updating, or more accurately, rewriting my Twitter gadget / widget for iGoogle. I'm really happy with it, now. The progress I've made is making me excited. I've learned a bit of AJAX today in order to make some nice changes. Want to have a look? Do you already have a Google account (like GMail) ?