So what's with Twitter sucking so much lately. I understand they're having trouble with ROR but why are their external clients having trouble and what's with these rate limits. My God. I love twitter because I have news services piped into it during the day to give me the latest news. Without twitter the world will be a Jaiku place. I hope they fix it soon.

The external clients are fine… the problem is that Twitter has imposed harsh limits on how many requests the external clients/the API can perform because of their shoddy system – it just can't hack the amount of users and crashes all the time.

it really is going down the pan... they really need to sort out their services before they carry on..

Like moving onto PHP… *cough*

There's nothing wrong with Ruby, its how they built it that is flawed.

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/06/06/...s-sink-twitter/

 

And its certainly not API requests that is slowing twitter down, I've been running a direct Javascript twitter feed on my new site, and it can slow the loading of the page down by 25-30 seconds. Its ridiculous, if it doesn't clean up by the time I launch it, I may well take it off alltogether.

I have the twitter widget on my page and I see no loading issues, it loads in about 4-5 seconds

Yeah does seem to be a little quicker today, but 5 seconds still isn't acceptable IMO. I wish you could cache the updates locally and run a script to check for new updates every hour rather than on every page load.

 

Someone should really develop something like that using the API

Ya, but mine loads the whole page and then loads the widget, and its at the bottom of the page so by the time they get to the bottom its already loaded

I've never had a problem with Twitter, even with the downtime (which I've never experienced).

 

I guess it pays to be boring and anti-social.

True I think I've only ever seen one of your updates ever - which was something about a headache!

There's nothing wrong with Ruby, its how they built it that is flawed.

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/06/06/...s-sink-twitter/

 

And its certainly not API requests that is slowing twitter down, I've been running a direct Javascript twitter feed on my new site, and it can slow the loading of the page down by 25-30 seconds. Its ridiculous, if it doesn't clean up by the time I launch it, I may well take it off alltogether.

I know. I'm just a PHP fan

 

It's sloppy code that's let them down… it seems like they have got to a point where they will need to rewrite it all from the ground up.

 

Twitter admitted it themselves that the API requests were really kicking it while it was down, it's the whole reason why they've limited it back over the last few weeks. While I developing Rawkes it started taking about 5 seconds to load each page and it was really worrying me. It turned out to be the Twitter feed as it loaded fine with it turned off

 

It's a shame because Twitter was really great at one point.

to be honest i "maybe stupidly" assumed Twitter was coded in PHP but now i see the error of my ways

I know. I'm just a PHP fan

 

It's sloppy code that's let them down… it seems like they have got to a point where they will need to rewrite it all from the ground up.

 

Twitter admitted it themselves that the API requests were really kicking it while it was down, it's the whole reason why they've limited it back over the last few weeks. While I developing Rawkes it started taking about 5 seconds to load each page and it was really worrying me. It turned out to be the Twitter feed as it loaded fine with it turned off

 

It's a shame because Twitter was really great at one point.

I reckon I might be able to build a locally hosted script that caches updates,( was working with something similar this week) if I ever get a spare 5 minutes... lol

Might give it a quick go tonight - I could be talking complete crap though and it might not work at all.

ok,

 

working example here:

 

http://www.eggmandesigns.co.uk/magpierss/twitcache.php

 

But I don't actually know if it's caching anything

 

Source code below.. any ideas?

 

(PS. I know it's displaying the tweets in p tags rather than <li>'s I'll fix that later if it does actually cache anything)

 

<?
// Twitter FeedCache
// Version 0.5a
// Written by John @ eggmandesigns.co.uk
// Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0
// http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
// Originally posted at: url to be added here...

//Source1: http://fuddland.org.uk/archives/2005/07/29/flickr_feed_parser_update.php
//Source2: http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/twitblog-syndicating-twitter-to-my-blog/


//---Settings---//

// Download and install Magpie RSS ( http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/ ) 
// Enter the path to it here
$magpath = 'http://www.eggmandesigns.co.uk/magpierss/rss_fetch.inc';

// Enter cache directory (must be writeable)
$magpieCachePath = "http://www.eggmandesigns.co.uk/magpierss/cache";

// Length of time [in seconds] to cache the RSS feed
// Set to 0 to turn off caching
$cacheFor = 300;

//Remove the username at the beginning of each entry. Case Sensitive.
$authorname = "EggManJohn";

// Enter the URL of your Twitter RSS feed
$url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14214338.rss';

// how many of your latest tweets do you want to display?
$num_items = 3;


//---Start Script---//

define(MAGPIE_CACHE_DIR, $magpieCachePath);
define(MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE, $cacheFor);
define(MAGPIE_CACHE_FRESH_ONLY, false);
define(MAGPIE_DETECT_ENCODING, true);
define(MAGPIE_USE_GZIP, true);

require_once($magpath);

define('MAGPIE_CACHE_ON',1);

$rss = fetch_rss($url);

function stripdate($whatdate) {
	$date = ereg_replace('\+0000', '', $whatdate);
	return $date;
}

function notime($whatprevious) {
	$notime = ereg_replace('([0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2})', '', $whatprevious);
	return $notime;
}


$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $num_items);

foreach ($items as $item) {
$desc = $item['title'];
$desc = ereg_replace($authorname.': ', '', $desc);
$date = $item['published'];
$date = stripdate($date);
if (notime($date) == notime($dateprev)) {

} else {
	$dateprev = $date;
	echo "<h4>".date("l, F jS", strtotime($date))."</h4>";
}
echo "<p>$desc <span class='time'>".date("g:ia", strtotime($date))."</p>";
}

//date_convert function from phpfreaks.com http://www.phpfreaks.com/quickcode/Date_Convert_Function/256.php
function date_convert($date,$type){
 $date_year=substr($date,0,4);
 $date_month=substr($date,5,2);
 $date_day=substr($date,8,2);
 if($type == 1):
  // Returns the year Ex: 2003
  $date=date("Y", mktime(0,0,0,$date_month,$date_day,$date_year));
 elseif($type == 2):
  // Returns the month Ex: January
  $date=date("F", mktime(0,0,0,$date_month,$date_day,$date_year));
 elseif($type == 3):
  // Returns the short form of month Ex: Jan
  $date=date("M", mktime(0,0,0,$date_month,$date_day,$date_year));
 elseif($type == 4):
  // Returns numerical representation of month with leading zero Ex: Jan = 01, Feb = 02
  $date=date("m", mktime(0,0,0,$date_month,$date_day,$date_year));
 elseif($type == 5):
  // Returns numerical representation of month without leading zero Ex: Jan = 1, Feb = 2
  $date=date("n", mktime(0,0,0,$date_month,$date_day,$date_year));
 elseif($type == 6):
  // Returns the day of the week Ex: Monday
  $date=date("l", mktime(0,0,0,$date_month,$date_day,$date_year));
 elseif($type == 7):
  // Returns the day of the week in short form Ex: Mon, Tue
  $date=date("D", mktime(0,0,0,$date_month,$date_day,$date_year));
 elseif($type == 8):
  // Returns a combo ExL Wed,Nov 12th,2003
  $date=date("D, M jS, Y", mktime(0,0,0,$date_month,$date_day,$date_year));
 elseif($type == 9):
  // Returns a combo Ex: November 12th,2003
  $date=date("F jS, Y", mktime(0,0,0,$date_month,$date_day,$date_year));
 endif;
 return $date;
};
?>

Peep my blog for a good run down on the whole twitter sucking thing.

 

http://www.gregsarpy.net

Rob? Anyone? (see last post of previous page)

I just clicked on it to check it out but it's taking ages to load/it's crashed. No doubt it's Twitter's fault and not yours…

Classic!

 

Try again now, seems to be working at this end

 

http://www.eggmandesigns.co.uk/magpierss/twitcache.php