RyanK's dashboard

RyanK replied on November 02, 2008 20:19 to the question "I am tracking a two word combo" in TweetTrak:

"Grand Haven" should do the trick!

You can always test your search term by going to http://search.twitter.com and trying out things there. TweetTrak is really just running searches for you on your behalf and sending you DMs with the new results.

Hope this helps!

RyanK replied on November 01, 2008 18:42 to the problem "Hey TweetTrak, I think you're down again... not getting any of my DMs" in TweetTrak:

ack, found another place where i am connecting to twitter where i am not trying to catch any unexpected behavior.

Sadly, most of this code was written in a weekend and hasn't been put under heavy load. There are only two methods that actually need to connect, and i had only added the error handling code to one of them.

i am in the process of rewriting everything so that it is object oriented (nerd speak so that it is more elegantly designed to reduce code duplication and make it easier to find, fix, and prevent these sorts of problems).

TweetTrak now gives me useful error messages, and if it goes down again in the near future, it will be in a unique and unexpected way.

There was about 6 hours of downtime this time around. (I like to be honest and transparent about the project). Its working now and has sent out all of the delayed notifications.

Sorry for the trouble, but Thank You for reporting it!

RyanK replied on October 31, 2008 10:03 to the question "is there a filter for english only?" in TweetTrak:

looking at http://search.twitter.com/operators it doesn't appear as if you can specify a language to limit your results to.

However, presuming your search terms are english words, its very likely that only english tweets will match.

If there are terms you want to exclude, you can start a word with dash (their example is "beer -root" which would give you beer related tweets that are not about root beer). This method obviously isn't perfect since if the word root is used elsewhere it would prevent you from getting a tweet you may be interested in.

Do you have an example of something you're trying to search for that doesn't work well? I'm sure we could probably come up with some suggestions.

RyanK replied on October 30, 2008 20:22 to the question "please don't send queued up messages if the service is down." in TweetTrak:

I'm thinking that this is best as an option that the user can configure.

I've had people tell me that they like not missing a single thing and even if they are late, they would like to receive all of their messages.

Once some other changes are in place to allow for more user configurable values, it will actually be trivial to add an option.

Then the question becomes, should the default be to send all the delayed messages, or to not send them.

I'm thinking this setting will be global, but i could see people wanting to be able to set this for each term. (ie, always send me my @replies, but don't deluge me with #android things)

Thanks for the input though! I'm willing to implement whatever people think is useful!

RyanK set one of RyanK's replies as an official response to "Not Working Again" in TweetTrak

RyanK replied on October 28, 2008 22:28 to the problem "Not Working Again" in TweetTrak:

You are correct.

I have not yet been able to push an update out to the server as I'm doing some testing on have been busy with work and other stuff. =/

I'm actually rewriting a large portion of TweetTrak to allow for more expandability and better error handling.

I still don't know how or why this is getting stuck, but it should not be a problem in the near future.

Thanks for your patience!

RyanK replied on October 17, 2008 17:25 to the question "TweetTrack Not Working for Me" in TweetTrak:

Also, I just manually sent you a DM from TweetTrak that you should have received. if for some reason you haven't please let me know.

As to why TweetTrak isn't showing in your list of DM targets, perhaps there's a caching issue with Twitter or something. Checking the database, i see that you are tracking one term and you should have been sent a message confirming that when i reset TweetTrak.

Please let me know if you are continuing to have some problems, but I presume that everything is correctly working now.

Thanks! =)

RyanK replied on October 17, 2008 17:19 to the question "TweetTrack Not Working for Me" in TweetTrak:

Thanks for reporting this!

It seems sometime on Monday something happened which never should have happened, and wasn't handled properly within TweetTrak. This prevented a core part of what keeps tweettrak running from doing its job.

Namely, searches that failed on twitter (due to load on twitters search engine or network issues) were not restarted and thus some tracks were 'lost'.

Also, this core function is what is responsible for polling for commands via DM.

I have some code in place to reports to me when tweettrak crashes or when it can't send messages, but this condition wasn't preconceived. I'll be adding some tests for this and trying to figure out exactly how this happened.

Its a little bit of a mystery atm... and I've been busy this week away from internet access for the most part in a training class for my day job... so timing couldn't have been worse! =/

Regardless, things should be working now... sorry for the trouble. Off to grab some lunch with what's left of my break, but will be looking into this further tonight and over the weekend.

Thanks again!

A comment on the question "when will "tracking" be back?" in Twitter:

Hi srivi1!

It looks like mdy already covered the basics, but I wanted to point out that if your phone has web access, you can use m.twitter.com to send tweets as well.

I have a couple different twitter accounts (@RyanK and @TweetTrak, for example) and @RyanK goes to my phone... I'm tracking @TweetTrak using my own bot so I get messages whenever someone mentions it.

Normally I reply using my own name, but in some cases (like if I don't think that the other person has started tracking their own name) I'll login into @TweetTrak via my phone to post a tweet.

Hope that helps! And also, hope that you continue to enjoy using TweetTrak! – RyanK, on October 10, 2008 16:33

A comment on the idea "Strip @'s out of @replies pretty please?" in TweetTrak:

I'm actually surprised at how easy it is to make people happy!

I wrote the core of TweetTrak in a weekend because I missed Tracking.. There's a few more things to fix on it, but the response has been overwhelming.

Its really pretty trivial to implement all this... the only question is how well it will hold up under 10000+ users... word is slowly spreading and all seems to be running well so far!

Thanks for the support! – RyanK, on October 07, 2008 16:11

RyanK replied on October 07, 2008 16:03 to the idea "Strip @'s out of @replies pretty please?" in TweetTrak:

Wow.. I never heard about this before!

I'll add it to the list of things to do.. Once I get the website so that you can log in and set what you want to track on there, I'll add an option so that you can strip out the @'s...

I'm actually thinking of replacing them with a * or something... since that @ character actually means something and removing it may be confusing.

It will probably be a week or two before I get around to that.. I've had very little free time lately... =/

RyanK replied on September 27, 2008 00:18 to the problem "Track bot hits API Limit for Direct Messages" in Twitter:

In case you haven't realized... Tracking is now working 100%

New things in the works... I've received my laptop and I'm going to be setting it up over the weekend (wiping Windows (ewww) and installing Foresight Linux) so that I can do some development work on it again.

Much thanks to Crystal and Alex for their help (and patience with my pestering them constantly!) in getting this working.

RyanK set one of RyanK's replies as an official response to "What do I need to DM to TweetTrak to start tracking?" in TweetTrak

RyanK replied on September 24, 2008 19:10 to the question "What do I need to DM to TweetTrak to start tracking?" in TweetTrak:

Oh... ewww

Didn't realize it had formatted it that way! Sorry.. will get that fixed!

That should be 'track <term>'

So, presuming you wanted to track my username on twitter (really don't know why you would... but you could!) you would send a DM:

track @RyanK

That's it! You don't need to include any quotes or any other charecters... just track and what you want to search for.

Tweettrak.com has a bit more info and will be expanded soon.. and you'll be able to manage what your tracking on there. For bonus points, if you want to write complicated queries for multiple terms you can follow the link on tweettrak.com to the advanced search terms on search.twitter.com. All TweetTrak does is run searches for you.. so anything that works there will work with TweetTrak!

Hope this helps.. and hope you enjoy having track back! =)</term>

RyanK replied on September 23, 2008 03:02 to the problem "Track bot hits API Limit for Direct Messages" in Twitter:

Ok, it appears as if things have been working for about 4-5 hours... I've been hesitant to report the good news.

You should be getting updates regularly now. My new laptop is in transit and I'll be addressing some of the issues (dupe tweets when they match multiple terms, ignoring friends that you follow already, and some more robustness/scalability/statistics gathering)

Please reply here, at http://www.getsatisfaction.com/TweetTrak or just send a tweet with @RyanK or @TweetTrak.. I'll see them all.. =)

A comment on the problem "Track bot hits API Limit for Direct Messages" in Twitter:

Well, the problem isn't specifically with the API, I get the errors on the website as well when I'm at the limit. So it is conceivable that it may have been in this update.

And yeah, I heard from Alex on the API team... they were busy with some performance issues.. I saw the whales today too for the first time in a long time. I don't blame them at all.. like I said, they are managing a large app... My issue is not pressing in the larger scheme of things.

As for expectations, I just pass along what I can and try to give a grain of salt withi it.. hopefully people take it that way.

Good news is.. Alex said he personally will see that its done on Monday.. So no checking in on that this weekend... and I'm passing that info along.

Thanks again for your support and your positive comments... =) Things should be much smoother after this.. – RyanK, on September 20, 2008 02:35

A comment on the problem "Track bot hits API Limit for Direct Messages" in Twitter:

Thanks for the support!

Alex confirmed to me that the change should be rolling out and that it was delayed due to some larger high priority updates (the interface, i presume).

Also, the new interface includes a lot more AJAX calls, which means that the back end would need to be updated to support those calls, which means that the change to the code which checks the limits could also be updated.

That's why I was hopeful that the interface change included the backend changes. Seeing as how this was supposed to go in on Monday, and wasn't completed and that I was confirmed that it would go into today lead to my optimism.

The bad thing about being optimistic is that it gets your hopes up. When those hopes are continually dashed, it makes it hard to continue to be optimistic. Add in that when people are complaining about missing notifications, I have to blame it on Twitter and keep saying things like "it should be working tomorrow". It really makes me and my project look bad when I have to continue be proven wrong.

All that said, Twitter is a free service. I'm thankful for their efforts, I just wish that things actually went according to plan. I can't really work to enhance my project until this one issue is resolved, and its going on its third week now. =/

So yeah.. thanks for your support! I'm trying to not check in on it since I know it most likely isn't going to even have a chance at working until next week now... – RyanK, on September 20, 2008 00:04

RyanK replied on September 19, 2008 17:08 to the problem "Track bot hits API Limit for Direct Messages" in Twitter:

That only lasted about 2 hours... Direct Messages from @TweetTrak are being blocked again. So, I guess the interface update did not bring along the updates to allow the Direct Message Whitelisting to actually work.

There is still hope that the changes necessary for this are still going to be made today. With any luck it will go in before the weekend is here and this won't have to wait until next week.

Still no word yet from the twitter-folk... but still giving them the benefit of the doubt that they are still planning on getting this working today.

RyanK replied on September 19, 2008 15:30 to the problem "Track bot hits API Limit for Direct Messages" in Twitter:

OK, this morning, I see that twitter released many improvements to their interface. I have to presume that this is what the hold up was. That there wasn't an easy way to release the update to the whitelisting code without releasing the interface, and that wasn't ready.

At least I'm going with that.. easy enough to believe and makes me feel better about how everything went. After a 10 hour outage, about an hour ago it appears as if DMs started going out.

The test will be if they continue to go out all day. I have not yet heard back from anyone at twitter to confirm that the change is in and that they believe it is fixed. We shall see.

RyanK replied on September 18, 2008 22:05 to the problem "Track bot hits API Limit for Direct Messages" in Twitter:

Just got an email from Alex saying that there were some other deployments that delayed this one, but the current plan is that this change will go in tomorrow (Friday) so hopefully the weekend will be 'normal'.

I'll be keeping an eye on the tracking situation starting tomorrow afternoon and will tweet from @TweetTrak when its working... and hopefully won't have to tweet again about it being broken again.