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So, it will almost be Tweekly.fm’s first birthday soon (if I remember correctly Jan 7). The past few weeks has been hectic, juggling through servers, coding ducktape to keep it together, seeing it fall apart (AGAIN), and so forth.

Due to monetary and time constraints, I had to get up a watered-down version of Tweekly.fm: It only works manually. You enter your data and click send. As easy as that.

When I come back in January, things will hopefully start working again as it should (tweeting automatically). While last.fm did not want to buy Tweekly.fm, there is something else in the pipeline that will get Tweekly.fm back to its (automatic tweeting) glory it had a month ago. Hopefully it will happen sooner than later.

Sorry for the inconvenience guys! Thanks for the year as well!

And remember, keep listening.

So. Tweekly.fm is failing. It is growing too fast for a newbie solo developer like me.

I started it in the beginning of the year with next to no development experience. I still don’t have any legit development experience apart from hacking together MySQL and PHP with ducktape. This past few weeks has been an insanely hectic ride for Tweekly.fm!

First, I moved away from my current shared hosting to Mediatemple’s (dv) which completely failed on me. It hit the memory cap from all the traffic that was coming in. This week, I moved to Rackspace Cloud Sites. So far, I’m really impressed with the service. It could keep up with traffic really well, until I realised it had a hard cap on its .php scripts of 15min, which meant instant fail for my completely inefficient script.

I’m at a loss with what to do now. I realise the way I’m doing it now, simple just won’t work with the resources I have. I’m currently busy with a redesign, but I can’t keep the current Tweekly.fm up and running efficiently.

Considering that I am still a full-time student, I can’t spend all my time developing it.

So from next week unfortunately, Tweekly.fm will not be automated anymore. It will only work manually. You enter your data, you tweet. I will work to the best of my ability behind the scene to get it back to automated form when it is possible.

There is also another way to keep Tweekly.fm going… Get last.fm to buy Tweekly.fm. This way, the automation can occur with real ease on super slick servers and better programmers making it great.

If you would like that, I would appreciate an RT.

Apologies to those who like their Tweekly.fm to be automated.

In the past year, Tweekly.fm has grown tremendously and for a full-time student like me, I don’t have the money and time to keep Tweekly.fm alive. I have a long holiday ahead of me in which I will revamp, redesign en redevelop Tweekly.fm, but in order to sustain its growth, I need to get it onto a dedicated server.

I don’t have the funds and the banner on top here will barely cover the costs of hosting a dedicated server.

In the past week I’ve received generous donations, thank you very much! I don’t want to resort to having sign-ups be donationware, so I ask you, Tweekly.fm user, please donate any amount. I plan to attain only $1000. If only a quarter of you pay $1 it will be more than enough!

All the money will go towards paying the hosting in the upcoming year.

As a reward the person who donated the most will receive a permanent thank-you on the frontpage of the new Tweekly.fm.

Click here to go to the donation page.

Hello.

Given the incredible growth of Tweekly.fm, it has really been struggling under its current hosting. From this coming Wednesday, you will only be able to sign up with Tweekly.fm if you make a donation.

This is only temporary. As a full-time student (sitting with my textbook beside my laptop: writing exams next week), I just don’t have the time to research servers, optimise the code and work on Tweekly.fm.

When the holidays arrive (sweet glorious 2 months of freedom), I will do everything in my power to upgrade the Tweekly.fm experience, move onto new servers, etc.

SHORT FAQ:

1) Service will continue as usual. Old users won’t have to do anything. Just sit back as usual and enjoy the tweets roll by.

2) Any new users from Wednesday will have to pay a donation to sign up until Tweekly.fm can handle the growth.

3) This is only temporary. A new server will most likely appear in the beginning of December, when I will switch it back to its current state.

———–

This coming wednesday, Tweekly.fm will probably hit 15 000 users. So, this is just another BIG thank you to all you music lovers! If you are current user, donations are also welcome! Just go to Tweekly.fm (it is on the front page).

I will keep you posted.

Keep listening.

So, there has been interesting developments lately in the Tweekly.fm stable. Stable is actually the wrong word, because it is exactly what it is not.

It has been growing way too fast to keep it contained. It now has 13 000 users. My hosting company has been on my back for quite some time now, because I’m overloading the servers each time the tweets send. Thanks to the helpful @igitur, I have a pretty solid way of optimising the code/script. Unfortunately, as it is primarily the process of fetching data from last.fm that is slow, it is a losing battle. Inevitable down the line, I’ll keep running into optimisation problems.

I am not entirely sure where to go with Tweekly.fm at the moment. If I continue the service, I’ll have to upgrade, get its own server, get advertisers, et al in order to keep it running as it is running now. The problem with this method is that 1) I’m a full-time student. I don’t have a lot of time to spend on Tweekly.fm (which is why I haven’t actually optimised the script at all) and 2) Tweekly.fm is a mashup after all. I didn’t start it in the beginning to make money from it. It was purely a service I wanted, and thought other people would maybe enjoy. Monetising a mashup is a very iffy thing. I’m totally at mercy of Twitter and Last.fm (especially last.fm).

At the end of the day, I’m providing a service based off of last.fm. They could easily implement the Tweekly.fm feature and then I have to shut down everything. I don’t own any of the data, etc. I also don’t really have any right to this “IP” if you understand what I mean. I merely provide the conduit for the flow of data.

Which brings me to the question: do I want this? I don’t want to make a full fledged enterprise mashup. Should I go ahead with monetising and upgrading everything? Is there a way I can keep it “small” without incurring too much server problems?

Should I change the way Tweekly.fm works (less bandwidth)? There are still more social-twitter side features I can add (which I want to). Should I perhaps move it to manual tweeting? and then pay for automatic tweeting? Or spread it out across the week (user can choose when to send it)?

All these questions are plaguing me, and I don’t know where to go. After my university exams (starting next week), I’ll probably have to switch Tweekly.fm temporarily off, think about what I want to do with it, fix whatever needs fixing and take it from there.

What do you say?

I am seeing more and more people complaining that their Tweekly.fm isn’t working only to see their profiles updated later. A trend I see is that people revoke access, because they think their Tweekly.fm isn’t working, but it was working, the people only had to wait.

The problem with Tweekly.fm at the moment is that it has become slightly too big for what it was in the beginning. It has almost 11 000 users now and the script is taking about 5 hours to send. That means that tweets are spread out, by the order in which you signed up, over 5 hours. So you might think that your Tweekly.fm isn’t working, but you should just be patient… for now.

I’m currently in the process of speeding up the script. If push comes to shove, I can always optimise the script, parallelize it, add more computing power, but in the end, it’s actually a “broken” system. Down the line, it will eventually become too much. If I went all “start-up” on this, I could perhaps do it, but Tweekly.fm is a hobby project that I must manage.

So, I’m thinking of ways of changing the way Tweekly.fm works. With the new redesign, it should work perfectly. My main idea is making Tweekly.fm “manual”. Click a button and a tweet will be sent, just as it is now. If you want to auto-tweet, you must make a donation and then be able stipulate at what time your tweekly.fm tweet should run. This way, I can spread out the tweets and gather more money to pay for faster servers.

For now, I think it is a win-win situation.

Tell me what you think.

P.S. Advertising could also pay for the servers. 400k pageviews. 22k unique visitors. 400k alexa. You know you want to.