Ben Smith's dashboard

Ben Smith asked a question in twitterfeed on June 30, 2009 09:08:

Update on Yahoo Pipes throttling problem

About 50 (yes, 50... I really do want to become a paying customer ASAP) of my 80 feeds from Yahoo pipes are failing (feed not valid) although the RSS looks fine when inspected directly. I believe (from comments in another thread) this is related to Yahoo throttling requests from a new node which was added recently and which is yet to be white-listed.

Please could you confirm this is the case (login is OpenID http://clickpass.com/public/bensmith) for my account and advise an ETA / progress for resolution of this so I can make alternative arrangements if nesc?

Ben Smith replied on June 29, 2009 14:43 to the problem "Twitterfeed not updating with posts" in twitterfeed:

Ahhhh... that explains why the difference between what I can see manually and what Twitterfeed reports.

Thankyou!

I'll log it separately too, but some more detailed error messages (what the error returned to Twitterfeed was) would be really handy in troubleshooting this kind of issue (when it *is* the feed that's dodgy). And if it e-mailed me error notifications I'd actually come 'round your house with a bucket of money this evening (well, kind-of... you get the picture).

Ben Smith replied on June 29, 2009 12:53 to the problem "Twitterfeed not updating with posts" in twitterfeed:

Most of my feeds say 'invalid' on the dashboard, but the one's I've tested do have data in the source RSS and validate fine in the 'edit' screen. The biggest account I'm feeding is @uktrains.

Looks like it's been dead for a few hours - has been working happily with these feeds for many months.

Wish I could pay for this product (!)

--

Quick update: This may be a Yahoo Pipes issue - seems unusually slow, but consfused why the feed validates so quickly...

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Ben Smith shared an idea in Handcrafted on February 06, 2009 21:00:

Feed-bot update frequency - configurable

Allow users to configure time between tweeting a feed and number of items to process per 'go'. 10 mins is a convenient frequency now, but I would like to add some feeds owned by other people (with permission) and to be able to limit the load on their site.

Ben Smith shared an idea in Handcrafted on February 06, 2009 20:55:

Add support for more URL-shortening services

Add different URL shorteners such as is.gd and tr.im - these both give shorter URLs than bit.ly and tr.im's account feature allows you to track URLs that have been processed.

Ben Smith replied on February 06, 2009 20:52 to the question "Feed-bots working?" in Handcrafted:

Sorry.... blank description also breaks it (!)

If you can allow blank title or description can the ' - ' be omitted too?

Ben Smith shared an idea in Handcrafted on February 06, 2009 20:49:

Which bits of a feed to tweet

Please could you mimic twitterfeed's approach and let users choose to tweet title, description or both?

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Ben Smith replied on February 06, 2009 19:49 to the question "Feed-bots working?" in Handcrafted:

Thanks Josh - I'm not familiar with the RSS specs? Should I ensure the Pipe provides a URL or is it legit to leave it out. (I don't want to include a link).

Ben Smith replied on February 06, 2009 19:17 to the question "Feed-bots working?" in Handcrafted:

Errors such as feed '404', unable to parse feed, timed out, twitter authentication failed... Not Ruby output, but something to indicate why nothing's happening :-)

Also for debugging it would be nice to see 'last item tweeted', but that's the cake and eating it :-)

Awesome service - saves having to DIY... really want to see this get mature and pay for it.

Ben Smith replied on February 06, 2009 18:04 to the discussion "Pricing for post-beta launch" in Handcrafted:

If the product got a bit more mature and proved reliable, I would pay around £25 per month for the service. More (about double) if it was robust enough and configurable enough to run clients' services on (note: not for spam, but for corporate Twitter accounts and announcement-bots).

Ben Smith replied on February 06, 2009 17:25 to the question "Feed-bots working?" in Handcrafted:

That bug fix worked great, but I'm now testing another source in preparation for setting up a couple of bots and it doesn't appear to be working - this time the source is RSS from Twitter's API coming via Yahoo Pipes.

Would you mind taking another look? WIthout any error logs / alerts on the service it's hard to know what the root of any problem is...

Thanks!

Ben Smith replied on February 04, 2009 23:46 to the question "Feed-bots working?" in Handcrafted:

Could you take a look at my single test bot on account bensmithuk - it's not feeding anything for > 10 hrs on a feed I know has changed?

Ben Smith asked a question in Handcrafted on February 04, 2009 12:58:

Feed-bots working?

Do feed-bots work and how long until they start tweeting? What's the frequency of updating?

Ben Smith started following the idea "TwitterFeed Pro, now with super-frequent updates!" in twitterfeed.

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