loudtwitter

loudtwitter is now opensource

Today, Loudtwitter goes Open Source, if you think this code is of any                       

usefulness to you, please have a look: http://github.com/yannk/loudtwitter

Advanced Title Formats

please note that this has never been released. though it's in the source code.

After a while having your tweets always posting with the same title is a bit boring, one way too avoid this problem is to not specify a title at all. Another solution is to use title formats, here is how it works:

Your title needs to be modified to start be something like: 

fmt=Your title goes here

After this equal sign the following rules apply: (derived from CDLR patterns)

• If you want to include any lower or upper case ASCII characters as-is, you can surround them with single quotes (')
• yyyy: The year
• EEEE: The wide format form for the day of the week
• EEEEE: The narrow format form for the day of the week
• MMMM: The wide format form for the month
• MMMMM: The narrow format form for the month
• MM: The numerical month
• HH: the 24h format hour
• hh: the 12h format hour
• a: AM or PM for the time
• mm: the minutes
• W: the week of the month
• dd: The numeric day of the month

So for instance:

• fmt='tweets posted on' yyyy-MM-dd 'rock''n roll!'
• fmt=EEEE'''s tweets' (Monday's tweets)

Please also note:

• %NT will be replaced with the number of tweets in the body
• %NR will be replaced with the number of replies in the body
• The date used for formatting is a bit special, it's the date the tweets are posted, except if it's earlier than 9am in which case the reported day is from the day before. The assumption is that user's posting in the morning want to report the tweets from the day before. 

longer maintenance

update: Loudtwitter is now back-online and fully up.

The planned maintenance tonight (to move the server from one datacenter to the other) is taking much longer than anticipated...

I'm sorry about that, I'll resume service as soon as I come back online... which is tomrrow, If I believe this progress bar :-(

Sorry for the inconvenience, I guess I'll work on something on my TODO list in the meantime...

FAQ about recovery

Q: Do I have to signup again?

A: No, your account should still be there, we had no data-loss. But If you have changed your blog/password/twitter account or settings, you might want to sign in and have a look around.

Q: Did you change anything or is everything the same?

A: Nothing changed, except for hosting and few technical things.

Q: Will Loudtwitter be back-posting or will it just be starting to post from this point forward?

A: It won't back-post, since it's a bit too intrusive. Posts will resume starting today

Q: Are you really back?

A: YES!

Q: I have an error when testing my setup about "Email...", - OR - I didn't receive the Email

A: I have just changed email settings, please try again.

Q: Do you have a new Blog design?

A: Yes, this is TypePad new micro-blog design. Do you like it?

A few other things you should know:

• Loudtwitter need to catch up with all the tweets you published during the downtime, that's a lot, you guys are chatty! (Loudtwitter kind of backup all your tweets in fact), so things are little bit less snappy, especially on the new hardware.
• Things appear to be working so far, but expect some rough edges, since it's a completely new installation. Leave a comment if you notice something abnormal.
• One of the server is scheduled to move datacenter this week (to be on the same datacenter than the other one). I'm waiting for the green light from linode, but this should only take 5mn.
• I've a couple of other maintenance foreseen, so watch this space, and my twitter account for updates.

Thanks,

And... I'm back!

It's been a while... but things have been a bit more complicated than I wished for. First, with the previous hosting provider: It took much more longer than I expected to get TDHD (The Damn Hard Disk)... Then, my internet connection at home broke and that didn't help (It's still not entirely fixed).

This experience taught me a lesson or two.

• "Real cheap" hosting doesn't really exist, or you necessarily sacrifice reliability, quick recover ability, or support.
• While waiting for the hard disk, I realized that I needed a way to get back online much quicker, so I started working on that.

Also,

• You guys really like the service and really wanted it back. The donations I've received were the most tangible proof of that. So...
• ... Thanks again for your donations and/or kind words!
• This service needs to find a sustainable way to continue to exist. I'll be working on that, and I'll keep you updated.

I've chosen linode as the new hosting provider. This is entirely different type of hosting, so I had to adjusts things to make it work with tight memory space. I've written Chef scripts to basically reinstall loudtwitter in 5mn, but hopefully I'll never have to use them for castastrophe events!

Well, I'm really happy to be back, and I'm looking forward to the future. 

Thanks for your support...

I've received a lot of encouragements (tweets, mails, phone calls, comments) on continuing the service...

People offered donations or help to make loudtwitter live longer, so I certainly feel obliged to do my best for all of you (Loudtwitter used to ship tweets to blog/email ~6000 times a day last I checked).

I'm still in contact with the hosting provider and trying to get the damn hard disk back, which is as I said in a previous post the best solution for me to get Loudtwitter back on its feet.

Thanks for you support and patience.

DNR* for loudtwitter

Let's do a quick tour of the situation:

I enjoyed a lot working on loudtwitter and the challenges it represents. I had fun times but also horrible time dealing with bugs (my bad), support (some nice people out there, and also some jerks) and technical issues.

Financially, loudtwitter operates at loss. Some nice people donated money (up to $50 for one donation!), some didn't (and that's ok, too). The donations totaled $336 over two years, but the operation expense (not counting my time ;) is $575 a year (hosting + domain name).

If I get back my Hard Disk (odds aren't looking good), then I'll probably renew LT domain and continue monitoring it and making sure it works. If I don't... restarting will be too much work for me, it would mean:

- Reinstall the operating system

- Reinstall the code and all software moving parts (Perlbal, Gearman etc...)

- Since I won't have the exact software version I was running, I will spend a lot of times to make it run the way it was previously running (I'm thinking about OpenId here and some other software: Catalyst)

- Reconfigure mysql in active-active replication on the same box (tricky)

- Reconfigure the backup system

- Restore the backups (I don't know how old, yet)

- Making sure it runs correctly

So, we'll see, but I hope you understand my current thinking.

*DNR: Do Not Resuscitate

Loudtwitter is dead (at least for now)

At 8:30 PST yesterday Loudtwitter server stopped responding. This morning the Tech Support told be that the motherboard is dead. I don't have access to the data on the server for now. I'm trying to get a hold on the backups, but since the main server is down this is taking more time.

I'm working with my hosting provider to resolve this situation. And I will keep this blog and twitter updated with progress.

Bear with me...

Yann

Filtering your tweets

I wanted to recap what are all the options you can use to filter tweets sent to your blog (or email). 

Saving and archiving your tweets is important, but let's face it, it's sometimes nice to be able to filter out some of them, like this "@joe yes" or this "going to the bathroom #noise" tweets, which are meaningless in a blog context or worse rather embarrassing.

On the other hand, the most conservative of you would like to just send to your readership the gist of your tweets, like all the twitter-haiku you're so proud of!

They are three different filtering mechanisms options:

• #noise will be filtered out automatically (no need to setup anything)
• @replies (provided they are real replies by twitter definition can also be filtered out if you set the option in the LT management screen.  
• #lt #lifetweet #loudtweet #loudtwitter will be filtered in if you tick the according checkbox in LT management screen  

Let me know what do you think in the comments

New feature!

I've added a new feature that I think might be really helpful. You can now filter the tweets you want to post on your blog (or send by email). I believe it can help reduce the signal/noise ratio that goes into your blog (and to your readers) provided you think about ahead of time.

Fortunately, the process is fairly easy: just add the hashtag #lifetweet (or #lt for short) in your tweets and check the appropriate checkbox in your preferences:

important:

I have also fixed an issue reported by @sk8bette and now @replies behave slightly differently. Indeed since I've implemented that feature twitter changed its API, and it's now very easy to distinguish a real reply from a casual @something. So if you are filtering out the replies from your posts, be sure to use real twitter replies.

tip:

You can also use #life-tweet, #loudtweeter #loudtwitter but it will leave you less space for the rest of your message.

These days, I'm doing more database maintenance which makes loudtwitter a bit late or slow sometimes, sorry about that. You can help me by donating (I do loudtwitter on my free time, thanks!).

Loudtwitter Updates

I had a bit more time in my hands lately (thanks to my lovely daughter who is now sleeping through the night, yeah night is when I can do this kind of stuff), so I used some to show some love to loudtwitter, and hopefully if all goes well, there will be more to come.

- Added a second database for redundancy and backups.

- Which allowed me, to do an upgrade of the database schema, fixing very long tweets (definition all long being all "twittesque"), in some languages (asian languages mostly).

- Improved latency on the site by adding a light front-end.

- Fixed some logging issues and other minor glitches

- Fixed an issue where you wouldn't get posted the first day of your registration.

There are a numbers of thing I know I should do, and I'll try do that as time permits.

I just find it a bit discouraging when I see such tweets: http://twitter.com/brontewhore/status/1164701444

I know there are some delays and this is in my TODO list.

Yann

TypePad connect, LiveJournal datacenter move

I've enabled the great TypePad Connect on this blog, it improves commenting a bit, notably by enabling threaded comments. You shouldn't be presented the CAPTCHA that often anymore too.

Some have been wondering if LJ datacenter move is related to the outage. I still investigate this, but I don't believe it does. So don't trust the word on the street saying you should change the ATOM endpoint. Atom stream and Atom endpoint are two different things (and the terminology is confusing, I know). 

Community news about Atom Stream moving, full of misleading comments

My reply

Loudtwitter woes

Hi all,

While I was abroad in vacation, loudtwitter started to have some issues (I acknowledged the issue http://twitter.com/loudtweeter/status/1032676187, but I couldn't blog here, then). Anyway, I'm still troubleshooting, it might work correctly for some of you but some of you might still miss daily posting.

Bear with me while I investigate these issues. Loudtwitter may have over-capacited the server it's on, at least until I do some changes.

twitter rate limits changes

For the last couple of days loudtwitter is working in a degraded state because Twitter arbitrarily changed its rate limits.

To get your tweets loudtwitter is pulling the information from your public page, which worked well until the change. Now one computer can only fetch tweets a few times per day. Since there are 10.000 accounts on loudtwitter it doesn't really work. I've contacted twitter about that issue, and I'm waiting to hear from there.

Stay tuned.

Almost one year

I've just renewed loudtwitter's domain (thanks to donations), which remind me that loudtwitter is now almost one year old!