The twitter recap: About five to six months ago I added the first twitter box to rantfest. It was kind of rough, I basically parsed out the info I wanted from the RSS feed and displayed it on the page. It worked most of the time but, it had a library issue. It could use one of a couple of libraries for xml handling, but it would periodically get confused getting the data back out (I think it was sending to one library and then asking another one for the answer). So half the time it would either appear to not do anything or it would error out so bad it would cause the page to die. I eventually got annoyed with it and took it out.
Take two came about two months ago. I started reading up on Net::Twitter, which is the closest thing to an official API perl has from what I can tell. It was much cleaner, could do far more, and it seemed everything was coming along nicely. And it worked great for awhile, then the same problems came back. But with the better API, I was able to determine the cause was really twitter. Apparently, the REST API (twitter's actual API that Net::Twitter interacts with) is just down all the damn time and as twitter is getting more and more popular, it is getting worse. I suppose to be fair, I should point out that twitter is first and foremost a mobile service and all this net stuff is secondary. So as twitter gets busier, the net stuff is pushed to the side.
Anyways, I decided I would collect all my tweets in the database and periodically poll the site for new ones and store them. Then, when the page loads, I just pull from the database, and display. Sounded easy enough. Sadly, it wasn't. It seemed the API was down everytime I felt like working on it or it would go down shortly after I started which added to the frustration.
Thus far, I have collected all my tweets (current as of this post) and rantfest is set up to display them as well. Now all I have to do is set up the automated script to poll twitter and add new posts. That is probably going to be a tomorrow or later today thing.
