web
Posted Fri, 10/02/2009 - 04:14 by metarobert
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.
Posted Wed, 01/28/2009 - 06:36 by metarobert
I had such a hard time finding podcasts I liked, and was SO appreciative when I found someone else who had a list I liked, that I thought I'd better return the favor. Below is a list of the podcasts (or netcasts, if you prefer) that I'm currently subscribed to.
Subscribe:
RSS, Podcast - Home Page:
The Naked Scientists Naked Science Radio Show PODCAST - Stripping Down Science
Subscribe:
Posted Thu, 09/11/2008 - 11:07 by metarobert
Over at
32Hours I posted links to the beta versions of the BeTwittered client that connect to
Identica and to the TWiT Army's
Canteen. Almost immediately after making the Canteen version available, I found that a simple port is OK, but that those darned Laconica servers actually have MORE features, not just a Twitter compatible API. I have a bug in BeTwittered to fix (favoriting has broken. bah) and now I have some features to add to the two new beta clients. A couple of those new features are
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 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 Sat, 03/15/2008 - 11:44 by metarobert
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
Posted Sat, 02/23/2008 - 05:37 by metarobert
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
Posted Sun, 01/20/2008 - 07:28 by metarobert
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...
Posted Sat, 01/19/2008 - 10:58 by metarobert
BeTwittered has been on Google as a homepage gadget for a couple of weeks now. Today I created a mobile version that is more useable on a phone ->
http://32hours.com/betwittered. You can follow the link to have a look, even from your computer. This version drops some things like automatic refreshing every few minutes, and is a bit more simplistic in order to be "lighter" for use on a phone. If you run it from your computer, be aware that it's intended for small screens.
