Gareth J M Saunders's dashboard

Thanks Marco, you're a star. I suspect that it's a Twitter (or an Amazon) issue rather than Twhirl, as I currently can't view *any* avatars on Twitter.com.

This URL (for the avatar of someone I follow):

http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_produ...

returns a Page Load Error: s3.amazonaws.com could not be found

I'll just be patient, thanks again.

Gareth

To use twitter from within twhirl, it needs to access the twitter API over HTTPS (port 443) and also must be able to request data from other webservers via HTTP (port 80). HTTP is used to load avatar images, use external services like TwitPic, URL shortening, Summize search etc.

For avatar images, twhirl gets the URLs from the twitter API and simply requests them using HTTP. They are usually stored on an external hosting provider (Amazon S3). Maybe this helps you to trace down what's going wrong for you?!

I've just uninstalled then reinstalled Twhirl ... and now I'm getting absolutely NO avatars whatsoever, just grey boxes. At least before I had some.

Scrolling down and then back again to trigger the reload isn't working either. It's not my software firewall that's blocking things, I've just checked.

You say it could be a network thing. Is there a particular port that Twhirl is using that could be blocked that's causing this, or a URL? Thanks.

Gareth

Hi,

avatars not showing up in twhirl is usually caused by a network issue. twhirl does "lazy loading" for avatars: it displays the tweets with placeholders first and then loads the image from the remote URL, replacing the placeholder when it got the real image.

If some avatars don't show up (you see the gray square instead), twhirl wasn't able to load the avatar image. Scrolling the tweet out of your viewable area and then back in will trigger a new try to load it, so if it was a temporary issue, this might help.

You cannot clear the cache, and there is no need to, as twhirl automatically re-requests avatars it could not load. And I don't think a reinstallation would help, as the problem seems to be some kind of flaky network access (or at least to the server the images are available from).