Archive for September, 2009

Tweekly.fm – Growing Pains

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

It took 8 months for the first 5000 users. It took 1,5 months for the next 5000. Yes, Tweekly.fm is now serving just under 10 000 music loving Twitter users.  Thank you very much. 20k unique visits, 385k pageviews (according to awstats) and a 430k alexa rank. I can see why:

“i am adding tweekly.fm and i must say i’m very excited about it’s existence, what a treat”

“tweekly.fm might be the best thing ever. and it’s saturday night. i am a loser.”

“haha, yeah, thanks. :D tweekly.fm just rules. :p”

“gives me a reason to start using Last.fm again. Nice service”

“Love this service. So cool to see everyones tweets on Saturday!”

And the roller coaster ride is just beginning! It’s growing so fast, I can’t keep up. Tweekly.fm is on a shared server at the moment, and I’m overloading it every time I send the tweets. I’ve been trying to figure what causes it the whole week. I tested the script again and again, and it turns out it was the XML that was slowing the whole script. It can’t be last.fm’s side of things (unless they are limiting calls without any notice), so it is definitely on my side of things.

I’m still in contact with my hosting provider. It could either be the fact that server to server transfer is rather slow. I’m still going to try and optimise the script.

But, this basically means the inevitable. I’m going to have to switch to a dedicated solution for Tweekly.fm some time soon. I can’t contain Tweekly.fm’s growth. In order to maintain efficient service, I might have to stop new sign-ups and if push comes to shove, I might also have to stop sending tweets until I can figure it all out. My problem with Tweekly.fm is, is that it’s a part-time project. Luckily my studies are taking a nice dip this coming weeks before the exams, so I’ll try my best to figure it all out so that all you people can just continue listening and sharing your top artists. (new design coming soon too)

If I have to move to a dedicated solution, I’ll have to gather some investment or at least get some dedicated advertisers to maintain it. The current advertising (only adsense) covers costs only just. It won’t cover a dedicated server (385k pageviews. contact me for advertising).

Because I don’t have a solid income (studying) to support Tweekly.fm, I have to rely on advertising. I’ll have to think real hard where I’m going with this. I might have to include a premium part to keep it all running.

For now I must wait and hear what my hosting company is going to say. Till then you can support Tweekly.fm by either advertising on the River Brothers network or donate through paypal (go to www.tweekly.fm. The donate button is on the front page).

Every little help is appreciated!

But most of all! Just keep listening!

Tweekly.fm server issues

Monday, September 21st, 2009

So, Last.fm upgraded this weekend, which meant I had to reschedule Tweekly.fm. I decided on Monday 12pm GMT. The script started sending, only to cut out after 6minutes. A few minutes I get a message from my hosting company telling me I overloaded the server… Odd. It turns, I’ve been overloading the server every time, but because today’s Tweekly.fm run was in peak times, they had to stop the script.

So today, only 260 tweets were sent. Sorry about that! I’m going to optimise the script and send the rest of the tweets after-hours tonight. Your tweets are coming! Don’t worry!

It will be interesting to see how the optimisation will pan out, considering that I’m going to cut down on LOADS of SQL queries.

Sorry for the inconvenience! Tweekly.fm will resume it’s normal “time” this week. Saturday night GMT time.

Changing Times

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

So last.fm is performing upgrades this weekend, which means I have to push Tweekly.fm to another time.

Tweekly.fm currently starts at 11PM (GMT +2) which means that its 9PM GMT and 5PM in New York and and 2PM in San Francisco.  United States currently constitutes 90% of my traffic (yes that much). I wonder if it is because USA has the greatest cross section of twitter and last.fm users? I think it is mainly because the tweets have been sending in their “twitter” time, if you know what I mean…

So as an experiment, I’m going to run Tweekly.fm on Monday (because of the upgrade) on 12:00 GMT to see what Europe does.

Will be interesting to see the traffic changes. I think it will probably drop (more traffic from USA, means even more traffic from USA). Who knows, maybe it doesn’t change at all?

In the future, I guess I’ll have to make it so that each user can send theirs on their own time for maximum exposure… That is further down the development roadmap. But first, I’ll have to finish my currently new planned features for Tweekly.fm.

Tweekly.fm hits 7500 users

Friday, September 11th, 2009

I just actually needed a cool blog-title.

This blog is more just an update on the state of things.

Firstly, yes: Tweekly.fm has of this blog post hit 7500 users. It is also now under 500 00 on alexa ranking. It has grown tremendously the past few months. I am very happy about it! What started as just a simple service I wanted to use on my own in January of this year, is now supporting itself through ad revenue! That is not all though. I am going to upgrading and overhauling the Twitter side of the mashup in the coming month if university work isn’t bogging me down too much. Expect awesome features!

Twindie.net run by me and my bro (well my bro does more work atm) got a redesign and launched its first T-shirt range! It’s dry and lame.

I’m So Nerdy is going slowly at the moment. I’m sensing a redesign possibly and the eventual implementation of categories (and better sharing), but it is a bit low on the priority list. Too much other web and study-related things we are busy with. But please, don’t stop submitting hilarious nerdyness.

We also have a new website in the pipeline that should launch in the coming weeks. We love it.

In music-related news, we are busy with an EP for our project, called Dapper Jump. Expect it to sound like indie alternative rock with electro.

Yes, me and my brother are trying to take over the world.