I'm experimenting with the twitter streaming API. BeStream is currently a real-time stream of everyone I follow on Twitter and all messages sent to them (Not including messages from people with private timelines) It's archiving everything to sqlite database, so I'll have a copy of my twitter stream even when twitter doesn't keep it anymore. There is no admin type interface yet.

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 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

I've been hacking about in PHP again.  Found that my use of ereg was outdated by pcre's preg while listening to PHP Architects  "Pro PHP podcast." Besides these archane regular expression changes internally, I've made some nice changes to BeTwittered, my Twitter gadget for Google homepage.  I've made clickable links of replies Now, clicking on an @username will take you to that users homepage.  I've also added a settings page, and moved the logout button there with the new "no pics" option.  I felt moving the logout option w

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've gotten a PHP version of a Google (iGoogle) gadget working.  It follows your friends, and allows you to post, so far. Check it out at 32hours.com, or the direct article link. It's working, and I'll be improving it pretty quickly.

I'm thinking about writing one. A terrible, horrible, PHP tutorial, that is. Why not? There isn't another one out there. Well, maybe there are lots and lots terrible tutorials, but not self professed to be so. I'm thinking very seriously about writing a tutorial as I learn. I have some programming under my belt, and even a Google widget written in PHP, but I think I could use a fresh start. My thinking is that I may learn from it as I'm forced to think deeply about what I'm doing so that I can write about it, and that others might benefit as a side effect.