Some general updates
Tags: imsonerdy, myspace, oauth, tweeklyfm
I haven’t tested Tweekly.fm with OAuth implementation, but by the looks of it, the code looks about right. I’ll probably test it soon. OAuth won’t go live until I am able to sit by and see if all goes according to plan. Tweekly.fm updates runs on Saturday night. I won’t be here to test it and sit around to see that things go down without a hitch. So, the implementation will have to wait a week or two.
I’m also considering moving the updates a tad earlier (can’t find the link now, but Twitter slows down on the hour because of automation services). The other option I’m considering is moving Tweekly.fm to early monday morning and affixing the popular #musicmonday tag to it. It is the spirit of music after all. 
I’m also thinking about perhaps purposefully lengthening the script that sends all the tweets. The influx of users looking at the userpages is seriously slowing the server. I could always upgrade the server, but I don’t have the money. Which reminds me, I’m still looking for advertisers! This past Tweekly.fm tweet-run, it got 30000 pageviews alone.
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In other news, I’m So Nerdy is going rather well! The nerdy-ness keeps on rolling in!
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On the music front, me and my bro have been cranking out some tunes. You can go listen to them on MySpace!
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That’s all I have to say for now. Cheers!
I’m so nerdy, I coded this website.
Tags: im so nerdy
You might’ve seen it before, but now that most of the extra features is done, I am glad to announce I’m So Nerdy. To quote the about from the site.
Out there you’ve always known that there might be people just like you: people that choose World of Warcraft above their friends, people that speak 1337 IRL, people that can name all the Pokemon (including the really new ones) and those that can even recall the day they saw Star Wars for the first time. Somehow you thought you might be alone, and even unique in your nerdy dalliance, but don’t fret young one, there are more out there: some even better at Mario Speed Runs or tapping the Konami code. Here is your home. Say hello. Tell us your nerdy quests!
Yes, I’m So Nerdy is all about sharing your true nerdy moments. Some of my early favourites:
I’m so nerdy, I named my Female Night Elf Hunter in World of Warcraft after my crush in real life, just so that I could play with her. [link]
Yes, I’m so nerdy, I coded the most of this website from scratch. Well, not entirely. I coded a basic version of such a site some time ago called lolstupids. It didn’t really work out that great. The focus of the site was too broad, and it didn’t have social media to get it into use. Building on the basic PHP and SQL, I added more and more to I’m So Nerdy. I learned a lot from coding ISN. I sharpened my PHP skills and I learned to use jQuery (which is just awesome), cookies and working with captcha’s.
As per usual with website coding, IE meddled again, but without too much hassle, I got it looking okay. Phew. Enjoy!
Help to sponsor Tweekly.fm
Tags: tweeklyfm
Now that Tweekly.fm has started trending, I took the leap and got the Tweekly.fm domain.
I’ll need help to sponsor the bandwidth costs and the new domain. I am offering advertising space on Tweekly.fm. It is where the current banner is situated (under the logo).
Here is some stats:
As of today, Tweekly.fm has 40000 pageviews and is expected to hit 80000+ before the end of the month. It could even hit 100000 if Tweekly.fm continues on its trending streak on Twitter.
Mail me at sdlrouviere@gmail.com for rates. Looking preferably for South African advertisers, but contact me anyway if you are interested.
Twitter, please mix basic auth with OAuth.
Today, I spent close to 6 hours trying to implement a workable solution to running OAuth alongside my current basic authentication for Tweekly.fm. I got close to getting it working.
Yes, OAuth is great. But it is not great when you already have userbase of basic auth users. My problem is that IF I do implement OAuth, I’d want Tweekly.fm users to come back and switch. It’s a nightmare, since Tweekly.fm isn’t exactly a service where you use your login credentials again. I’d somehow have to get all the users to come back to switch. The only thing connecting OAuth with basic auth in my system is the last.fm username. Because of the way Tweekly.fm works, I can’t run both OAuth and basic auth. So, if someone wants to switch, I have to delete the basic auth, which is just too much effort for the user. Because the way Tweekly.fm works, I might also end up deleting another person’s subscription (you can choose any last.fm username, not just your own).
All I ask Twitter, is 1 special API method. Use basic auth to get the access tokens. This way, I can easily switch my whole userbase to OAuth without them having to do ANYTHING! You can even deprecate all the other functions of basic auth. Just allows us to get access tokens if we use basic auth.
It will even drop all the hurdles to get authorization in the 1st place (go to site, click, authorize on twitter, come back). Desktop apps will like this too. This way, you keep the ease of basic auth and have the security of OAuth (switching off rogue apps). The user won’t be phased. The developers might have trouble though. Basic auth is much better to learn than OAuth.
So, Twitter, if you want to switch to OAuth, at least make it easier for us to switch existing userbases to it.
Tweekly.fm trended!
Tags: oauth, tweeklyfm, twitter
I just stayed up to check to see if the update went through successfully (added some optimization, not much though).
Unbeknownst to me, in my slumber, Tweekly.fm was trending on Twitter. I never saw to what point, but it trended none the less! Here is some evidence of another great milestone.
http://twitter.com/twitscooptrends/statuses/2158416986
Tweekly.fm now grows with about +-200 users every week. Now that it started trending, it will probably reach the tipping point. Next time this week, Tweekly.fm will have more than 2000 listeners sharing their favourite music!
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There are still some features that I am going to implement. The biggest one, is adding OAuth support. Twitter hasn’t really made it easy to switch, so instead I must develop a way, to take yourself out of the old database and onto OAuth. Will take some time.
Thanks for using Tweekly.fm.
Facebook to rethink its redesign.
Facebook is currently rethinking it redesign. You know, the one that looks like Twitter. 2 months ago, I made a blog post detailing why they shouldn’t try to be Twitter.
In short: The highlights section is what gave Facebook a competitive advantage. Yes, there are people who like to read EVERY status update, but most people are casual users. They like to come to Facebook and want see immediately, interesting things that happened, and that’s precisely what the highlights did.
I’m really glad that Facebook rethought their move into Twitter wannabe-land.
I wonder if there are going to be people who will criticize the redesign back to the way it was.
“but but, just as I got used to it, you changed it. blegh. <MAKE GROUP>, <INVITE EVERYONE>… <GO DO A QUIZ>”.
What do you say? Do you like Facebook Twitter or liked the older one?
Surfing the real-time web
Tags: facebook, google, real-time, twitter, web
It is now the middle of 2009 and the web landscape is already looking very different from the start of 2009. Twitter is primarily responsible for the surge into the real-time web. Seeing Twitter’s success in covering news before any main news site is remarkable. It is here. It is now.
Facebook saw the success of Twitter and subsequently changed their homepage (which I still think is a bad choice). Facebook also made the status update feed real-time: an inevitable change, considering they also opened the status API. What is this Facebook? Are you trying to become Twitter with photos and quizzes? C’mon now.
Seeing the real-time building, Google saw that they were losing search power and made options available to their search to make it more real-time.
The biggest surprise to the real-time venue is definitely Google’s Wave. Will it change the way we interact on the internet? Who knows. When you see a wave (a real one) approach, it might seem huge, but that might mean it might break before it’s of any use to the surfer. Meh, it’s a bad analogy, but you get my point. Will be really interesting to see what Google Wave can pull off!
So where to now?
I didn’t expect to see this surge into the real-time web. I’m wondering what web services will filter into the real-time environment. The implications are immense to me. It means that people are now even more connected, right now. Within 5 minutes of it happening, I knew about the hudson river plane crash.
What implications it has on our psyche, I don’t know. We are more and more, constantly aware of the world and its happenings…
Where do you think the real-time web will go? What do you think the psychological implications are for being constantly and instantly connected?
Oldtweets – Browse your old tweets
Twitter hasn’t exactly made it easy to read your old tweets. Sure, you can just click on “more”, but it doesn’t go all the way back (only 40 pages) according to Twitter’s blog. And seriously, who has the time to click on “more” so much? There is services like TweetDumpr that dumps only 3200 tweets in .csv file.
For a blog post, I wanted to go back and to see what I tweeted about in the beginning of the year (that blog post is still coming). There is a way with Twitter URL manipulation to browse your old tweets, but this meant, you had to fiddle with the URL the whole time. I then looked on the net to see if I could find an app that I could use to my browse my twitter past… I couldn’t. So I made my own one. For a lack of a better word, it is called Oldtweets.
I first wanted to display your whole profile in an iframe and then manipulate the URL with an iframe, but Twitter is not friends with iframes. I then delved into the API and found a way around it.
Using the API, I also got the “last page” of tweets, so you can go check out your first ever tweet and all in between.
I made this quickly last night, just to get it out. I am going to hopefully make it more stylish in the future.
Enjoy browsing your old tweets!
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P.S. I now have a looong holiday ahead of me. I have a new website launching tomorrow. Another definite I am going to try and do is add OAuth support for Tweekly.fm. More blogging too.
Playtapus: Top Weekly songs.
Tags: last.fm, mashup, tweeklyfm, yahoo pipes
After seeing Tweekly.fm in action, @jherskowitz, decided to make a similar service, but for songs. It uses Yahoo Pipes to do its work.
What’s great about it, is that you can pull the data in various forms, like RSS or PHP. As you can see on jherskowitz blog, he embedded it and uses Streampad to play the songs right from his blog.
Not exactly like Tweekly.fm for songs, but very similar! Enjoy!
It was a difference in quotation marks
Tags: encoding, php, tweeklyfm, xml
Today, apart from studying I spent my time trying to fix a Tweekly.fm problem. It’s been there from the start, I only decided to fix it now. When I fetched the data from last.fm, there were occasions where there would be weird, strange characters, like “’”. It replaced quotation marks. Pondering, what caused it, I set off my adventure into google. It turns out that it was some form of encoding problem. PHP’s XML functions return them in UTF-8 encoding. I tried fixing it with PHP’s utf8_decode() function and even tried iconv(), but it didn’t work.
What baffled me even more was the fact that some quotation marks displayed properly… I sifted through the XML responses trying to find some trace of a meaning why it was happening. It turned out that there were different ways of writing quotation marks (or inverted commas). There is the normal straight-down one: ” and the bent in one (that you can’t make on a normal western qwerty keyboard. I can’t, so I assume most keyboards can’t): ” (<– See my browser can’t display it properly). Normal ISO_8859-1 encoding used in most western latin-ised languages can’t display the “other” quotation mark. If you are in an english country, chances are your computer came with the default “Windows-1252″ encoding, which is a superset of “ISO_8859-1″.
This basically means that unless you tell your browser to show the right encoding, it will default to your… default encoding.
So in order to remove the stupid “’”, I had to tell my browser to use UTF-8 Encoding across the site. In the end it worked out.
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