Category Archives: News

Now with fewer errors!

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Okay, so the new prototype is fun and all, but what about the main service? It needed some love, too, right? It’s okay, we know — lots of yucky “Server Error” messages.

We reconfigured things on the web server a while back, and yes, we admit, we didn’t get everything set up the way we should have. But we’ve finally gotten around to taking a peek under the hood, and we think we’ve twiddled the right knobs to get things running more smoothly. In fact, we’re so sure that we’ve made things better, that we’ve raised the combined friends/followers limit from 3000 up to 8000.

If we can just get Geordi to quit hooking Data’s positronic brain into the ship’s computer, maybe we can keep this bucket of bolts flying right!

Update: We also changed the sorting of the lists so that users are listed in a more natural order. If you are looking for a particular friend or follower, it should be easier to find them, now.

 

What’s new with Twitual?

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You thought we were dead, didn’t you? Just another abandoned ghost service, floating along in the Internet like a mysteriously vacant boat in the Bermuda Triangle. Nope! Still here!

If you haven’t heard already, there’s a new prototype in the works (no, really — you can check out the Twitual prototype). It is very bare-bones at the moment (duh, it’s a prototype), but you should get the general idea of where things are going. My next steps are to add in functionality to let you drill into people’s details, add some real UI/design, improve handling of errors, and restructure the underlying code a bit.

Things might have been further along before now, except that I had been running into some technical problems. I won’t bore you with the details here, but I posted about it on my personal blog: Dealing with UTF in node.js

Not Dead Yet

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No, really. We’re actually working on new stuff!

A new version of Twitual is in the works. And when I say new, I mean new. Twitual 2.0 is being built completely from scratch, using the very latest cool web toys tools. It will be completely dynamic — no more waiting and waiting and waiting for results to come back to your browser!

The display will also be less cluttered. Rather than displaying all of the permutations and combinations of your friends and followers on the same screen, we will focus on one at a time. But we will still make it clear which tweeps fall into the various categories. Also, you will be able to get more details on friends, refocus to a new user, see recent tweets, etc.

Most likely, these features will be rolled out in stages (because you’d rather be able to do some of this than none of it, right?), and the timeline is still sketchy. I hope to have the first iteration up early next week (fingers crossed).

 

Bugs fixed, limit raised

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After the initial public announcement of Twitual, things took off pretty well. Unfortunately, we discovered a sporadic bug that was causing us to sometimes get into a never-ending loop requesting information from Twitter, and resulting in “Twitter Overload” errors on our site. We’ve identified and corrected that problem, so if you were having trouble before, please feel free to try again.

We know that some of you were frustrated by the 5,000 combined followers/friends cap that was in place. We are raising the limit to 10,000 now. After we give some more time for the service to shake down, we’ll try raising that up some more, and hopefully one day we can eliminate it completely.

And yes, it’s obvious that we need some slick-looking, AJAX progress bars to display while Twitual is fetching and processing all the follower/friend information. That will come in time, as will some other niceties. 

Thanks to everybody who has tried Twitual so far. Make sure you follow @twitual on Twitter to keep up with the latest news. Keep spreading the word!