DPAngier's dashboard

Hi DPAngier, Waffles, and Kevin1!

I've fixed this and pushed the update to Sandy's servers.

The site now takes into account whether you write your dates as 12/25/2008 or 25/12/2008 when you click any date in the sidebar calendar or select a date from any pop-up calendars associated with updating an appointment on the site.

The site — aided by Sandy's understanding of various date formats, American, European, and otherwise — even makes an educated guess if you happened to type a date manually into the URL (ex. http://iwantsandy.com/digest?date=7/2...) that doesn't jive with your date-time format setting [http://iwantsandy.com/settings/datetime] (in this case, assuming you meant July 24th, even if you're using the UK notation d/m/y.

I'm sorry this caused you some consternation. You caught me in the middle of a rather large update that wasn't quite ready to go yet — until now.

I'll be following up with some release notes shortly if you're interested in all the nitty gritty details of tonight's update.

—Rael

P.s. Thanks again, Kevin, for the mighty detective work!

Howdy again! I'm sorry, but that push got delayed. I'm preparing for an update right now and should be pushing it to Sandy's servers within the next couple of hours. – Rael Dornfest, on July 15, 2008 23:36

Brilliant detective work, Kevin1! You were absolutely right. I'll be fixing this and pushing it out this evening.

Rael

Howdy! I have indeed looked into it (and meant to post earlier but don't seem to have hit the submit button — sorry!). I've fixed the resulting issue I believe and will be deploying the update this evening. Please do let me know if it is still an issue after I post about the update (I can't seem to replicate it this end). – Rael Dornfest, on July 15, 2008 00:47

I think the date format used in the URL bar should be the international standard (ISO 8601). Year, then month, then day. 2008/08/03 is August 3, 2008.

It's less confusing. It's very simple and unambiguous. It's the same standard used for email. It's easy to tell if the date is wrong. It's international. It uses a fixed number of digits for each section. (i.e. A month and day less than 2 characters use a leading 0.) Example: http://iwantsandy.com/digest?date=200...

However, the problem people are experiencing isn't due solely to the date format used in the URL bar. The problem seems to be the use of two different date formats in different places, and no conversion existing between the two.

Different parts of the Sandy webpage use different date formats, and there is no format conversion. As far as I can tell, the "sidebar_calendar" on the Daily Digest page uses the date format that the user selected in their settings (i.e. European). The URL bar doesn't accept a different date format depending on what the user selected, it always uses the USA format. When the user clicks on a date in the sidebar calendar, that date is used as-is, without any conversion, and put into the URL bar to fetch the next page. The URL bar doesn't expect the date to be in European format, and the error occurs.

Ok, this is still going on and I don't see a reason for it.

Does anyone have any idea when this will get fixed? Because I really don't want to have to manually edit the address to get to certain dates.

This is still happening. Any chance it can get fixed?

There seems to be some sort of confusion as to what date format to use. 12/8/2008 is August 12, while 12/17/2008 is December 17.

In what world does that make sense?

This problem is still happening, and occurs when accessing from IE6 at Work and Safari 3.1 at home, so is not a browser setup issue.

the updates seem to be working again, for now.

I realise that there's more than one organisation involved in delivering sms, but doesn't the fact that people are reporting their sms count on their twitter page is remaining at zero - even when they *have* received sms - suggest that there is a problem within twitter itself? – notsheep, on May 07, 2008 04:40

Ok - my initial investigation didn't turn up very useful info. But engineering is aware of the problem as well. We're going to be putting in some additional logging which will hopefully point us at the problem.

The trick with SMS is that a lot happens upstream from us so it can sometimes be tricky to find out what's going on.

also, It seems I get a few after I send an update, but that doesn't last long. I also have a feeling that O2 UK does something funky with status reports which could be the issue (then again I could be completely wrong)

my twitter account is egelmex

same here - username stuartridout

Mine is the same as on here too.

Hi, my twitter username is dpangier, and I have been getting no SMS notifications on my O2 UK number for several days. – DPAngier, on May 06, 2008 21:07