Tag Archives: api

 

Foller.me: Almost Ready to Remove the Beta Label

With a few core changes to Foller.me (hope you noticed the performance tuning) we’re almost ready to remove the beta label. I wrote on Twitter a few weeks ago that the beta label will be removed in September, so here we are. I’m not sure if it means anything to you, but it does mean a lot to me. You see, a product in beta is used with caution most of the time, that’s what I do. I like to play with betas but I don’t actually use them (except for Yahoo! Pipes and others of course). I think there’s something similar between the words “beta” and “startup”, so yes, I’d like to show the world that we’re stable. No glitches, no more server reboots and ready for massive hi-destructive traffic (thank you Amazon EC2!).

A few words about the core changes. We improved our caching mechanism – the relations are now being cached for no longer than one day. They’re used when generating the followers map, while the topics, mentions and hashtags clouds cache for only an hour. Same caching now applies to the Foller.me API, besides, client-side caching is always welcome. This has speeded up our overall performance and it seems to be running smooth for the past few weeks.

The Foller.me API though is still being improved. We’re coming up with a few more feature improvements to the REST API, most of them will involve styling the clouds and we’re also working on a few more examples to show you how to get the most out of the API goodies.

The beta label removal date hasn’t been announced yet, but we’re thinking September (you know, in Russia kids go to school 1st of September each year, so we’re hoping that their parents buy them brand new PCs and of course a broadband internet connection, therefore kids will discover Twitter and hopefully Foller.me ;).

Thank you for all your support and good luck!

Update: Foller.me is still beta ;) just not yet .. (12/22/09)

Published 3 years ago with 2 comments tagged , , , ,


 

New WordPress Plugin: The Foller.me Widget

Here’s a way for you to show what you’ve been tweeting about lately. Right on your blog, in the sidebar. No Twitter passwords required, cause this thing works via the Foller.me API. This is the first ever app (widget, gadget, or whatever you wanna call that) based on our Foller.me API, so I hope we have a great start here, and you young developers out there, dig through this widget’s source code (which is GPL btw) and play around with the API. Perhaps your app’s the next, and please DO write to us if you do, cause you don’t wanna miss all the credit we offer ;)

The plugin’s located here: Foller.me Widget and hosted at the WordPress.org plugin directory right over here. Thank you for all your votes ;)

Published 3 years ago with no comments tagged , , , , ,


 

New WordPress Plugin: Twitter Followers Widgets

Hey, there’s a new widget that can display user pics of people you follow (and people who follow you) on Twitter. It updates whenever you gain a new follower.

That’s a new widget for WordPress I wrote a few days ago, and received aproval from the WordPress.org plugin directory today, so it’s the official launch. Go get yours right over here: Twitter Followers Widgets and don’t forget about the feedback! Yup, themes are cool, but widgets are way cooler! Also, as announced on the Foller.me blog today, we’ve finally released the public version of the Foller.me API so we’re gonna have more Twitter widgets developed next month, wohoo!

You may also dive into the development of your own stuff using the Foller.me API, it’s pretty simple, seriously, check out the API wiki and start making your own widgets! Because widgets are sexy ;)

Published 3 years ago with 4 comments tagged , , , , ,


 

Twitter API: Picking the Right Source

I’m sure you noticed that a few weeks ago Twitter changed the source that came unsigned via the API from web to API which could basically reveal any robot that is trying to act human, right? Well if you look at the statuses/update method in the Twitter API documentation they don’t say anything about the source parameter. Strange, right?

Well I read something about it on some forums and the Twitter API development talk Google Group had a discussion about this I believe, but most people still think that it’s the X-Twitter- headers that determine the source, but it’s not. It’s way too simple and it took me a few hours to figure it out using an HTTP sniffer on TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop and the others.

Turns out it’s the source parameter that is passed via POST together with the status text during the statuses/update call. So usually you would do something like:

$postargs = array("status" => "I'm tweeting via API!");
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postargs);

Now, how about Seesmic Desktop?

$postargs = array(
    "status" => "I'm tweeting via Seesmic Desktop!",
    "source" => "seesmicdesktop"
);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postargs);

Or TweetDeck perhaps?

$postargs = array(
    "status" => "I'm tweeting via TweetDeck!",
    "source" => "tweetdeck"
);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postargs);

Pretty cool, huh? Here’s a brief list of sources to pick from:

And I do believe that it’s the same way for all the other clients. Lowercase and no spaces. It is funny though watching a robot tweet 10 tweets per minute via TwitterFon ;)

Published 3 years ago with no comments tagged , , , , , ,


 

Foller.me: An Insight on Followers Geography

Hello everyone. Very busy week here and more good news! I have been asked about the future of Foller.me by many friends from Twitter and e-mail and IM, so I thought I’d share my thoughts here in public.

Foller.me is going quite good although there are a couple of bugs and issues that haven’t been solved yet, but we’re working on it very hard. The future? Well, that’s actually unpredictable, really. I’ll explain. We work out the areas that you (the end-users) want us to, and that is why your feedback is very important and it basically defines what we will be doing next. Yes, there are loads of comments and suggestions from inside the developers team, but we’re really looking forward to making a Twitter service that you people would use, and that’s our main goal.

Now today I’d like to give you a tiny little insight on what’s coming up next on Foller.me. We call it Followers Geography. Ever wondered where your followers are from? Or perhaps you wonder where your followers’ followers are from? Yes, there’s a location field in Twitter profiles which most people fill out quite good. Combining Google Geocoding and Google Maps, we’ve managed to scan through your followers’ locations and point them out on a map. Oh, and it also shows the current profile’s location (we totally forgot about that at first, hehe).

followers_geography

There are a few restrictions here, and the main one is definitely Google Maps API. Google allows around 15,000 API queries every day (while Twitter provides us with 20,000 every hour!) AND restrict their bulkness – there should be a 200-300 ms interval between each API call. So, generally you would have to wait for around 5 minutes to digest a profile with a thousand followers, and that’s where we came up with our great caching mechanism. The API calls are not made from within your browser. They run on a time-based (cron) job from our server to geocode new locations. Yes, it still takes a while to digest everyone, but you don’t get to see the delay and that’s the bright part of it!

The second restriction is your followers count. Your browser can’t handle 1,000,000 markers on a Google Map and that’s why we’re down to a maximum number of 500 followers (thus, locations) which works fast and doesn’t overload the browser with javascript. We’re working on a pagination system so don’t worry, you’ll get to see the rest in no time ;)

The public beta of Followers Geography is planned to be released by the end of next week. It’s going to be a new section below the three tag clouds and will be a small part of the huge “Followers” section in the future. If anybody would like to take a look at the living version post your requests into the comments, and I’ll provide you with an address, username and password by e-mail in exchange for good feedback ;)

That’s it for now. So how d’u guys like the idea? Anything else you’d like to see on that map?

Published 3 years ago with 6 comments tagged , , , , ,


 

Foller.me has Launched!

I’m glad to announce that Foller.me has launched today!! Hurray! We’ve already got some cool articles, shoutouts and tweets about the start, and more to (hopefully) come this night. Actually, some of them were written yesterday – timezones issue I guess.

follerme_screen

Anyway, we’ve reached our first goal yesterday night – 1000 unique profile views and most of our first few fans are very excited about The Foller.me Rundown which has been launched a couple of days ago.

The public version is available right over here: foller.me and you might also be interested in the blog: blog.foller.me. Thanks for all your support guys, we wouldn’t have done this without you, and YES, keep it up, because we’ve got plenty of surprizes coming to Foller.me this month, including a Greasemonkey script to inject Foller.me directly into Twitter, a WordPress widget and..

Oh yeah.. Totally forgot.. YES. A new section called Followers Geography! Yes, we are going to digest all your followers and spread them out on a Google Map! We’re running a few more tests on the developers version of Foller.me to make sure we have no problems with the Twitter and Google API limits. I will definitely announce once it’s public, so stay tuned!

For the latest Foller.me information you might consider following @follerme on Twitter.

Published 3 years ago with 7 comments tagged , , , , ,


 

Quick Flickr Widget and the Flickr API Services

Hope you remember the Quick Flickr Widget plugin for WordPress. Well, since version 1.2 I’ve changed the way it works. Prior to 1.2, as Donncha suggested in his Flickr plugin, I used a public Flickr RSS feed to display the items, using WordPress’ RSS functions to move around the feed. Anyways I thought that I couldn’t take the plugin far enough, so I decided to use the Flickr API Services which is way more extended.

Still not sure about the consequences of sharing my Flickr API key. I’ve got a Flickr call for converting a Flickr screen name to a Flickr NSID which requires a valid API key. I thought that asking everyone to sign up for an API key would be a loss of plugin users so I provided my own key. Hope they don’t get me killed ;)

Now, to the user interface and experience. I’m not sure why, but some people are still confused about the new way and there are those, who cannot manage to find out their Flickr screen name (thinking that it’s their Flickr username or Yahoo ID). Anyways I hope to get this all sorted out and solved by 1.3 (maybe I should feed from Flickr by user e-mail?). Tiny bug in 1.2 was the inability to use a Flickr screen name with spaces. Thanks to Tung’s comments I sorted it all out by 1.2.1 – I had no idea people would use spaces in their screen names.

Now, for all the geeks out there. The Flickr API Explorer is the most fabulous thing that makes the Flickr API so easy to use. And the JSON Validator really helped me out there (I use JSON because I like it and also looking forward to adding some Javascript features to the plugin). So keep your comments and suggestions coming on the Quick Flickr Widget page.

Also, I’d like to recommend a book called Pro Web 2.0 Mashups which helped me out with Flickr API usage.

P.S. The Apps & Hats show launched on Friday 20th. The first episode is so cool. Girls with iPhones are so cute! Check them out: Apps & Hats – Your Quirky iPhone Application Review Show.

Published 3 years ago with 2 comments tagged , , , , , , , ,


 

Google Maps and UTF-8

I bet everyone’s already using the UTF-8 encoding for all their pages. Well, windows-1251 remains the most popular russian encoding, although many people have realized that 1251 won’t go far.

I’ve been binding some Google Maps to a cp1251 page and hadn’t had any trouble viewing it through mozilla firefox and opera browsers, but when I switched to internet explorer, I had the google map all messed up. That’s probably because opera and firefox can handle multiple codepages, unlike explorer.

I’m pretty sure there must be a work-around this in the Google Maps API by passing some language parameters, though I still want my map to be in russian, not english. So I guess I’ll just have to stick to the UTF-8 encoding. Weird..

Published 4 years ago with no comments tagged , , , ,



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