More Twitter API Shenanigans

July 4, 2023 | Comment

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter things have been, how can I put this politely, a little unstable. Then, last Friday, the platform started to limit the number of Tweets that you can view. At the same time that this change was implemented my calls to the API stopped working returning the following:

stdClass Object (
   [errors] =Array (
      [0] =stdClass Object (
         [message] =Sorry, that page does not exist
         [code] =34
      )
   )
)

Searching online turned up nothing much about this specifc error message and nothing recent either. I spent a bit of … Read the rest

Transitioning from Twitter API v1.1 to v2 (Part 2)

June 7, 2023 | Comment

In the first part of this post, I showed how to set up your Twitter dev account ready for using v2 of the API. In this post, I will show you how to access that API and post a tweet.

Goodbye Codebird

I am moving from Codebird which has been great but only supports v1.1 of the API. I looked at all the PHP libraries that I could find and decided on TwitterOAuth which styles itself as the “most popular PHP library for use with the Twitter OAuth REST API”. I toyed with this package but couldn’t get it … Read the rest

Transitioning from Twitter API v1.1 to v2 (Part 1)

June 1, 2023 | Comment

As part of The Twitter Debacle^tm I have spent the last few weeks trying to get my Twitter bot working again which has taken quite a bit of effort.

I thought it might be worth looking at what I did to get my bot working again once access to the API was cut in February. As there is so much in this I have broken it down into two parts:

setting up your project and getting the keys you require to use the API
calling the API from PHP

Getting the keys

I struggled to find which keys to … Read the rest

The Twitter Debacle

May 26, 2023 | Comment

Ever since Elon Musk took reluctant control of Twitter he has been walking a tightrope as he balances bringing Twitter into the black with not losing the core base of users. That includes laying off a large number of staff.

One decision that I think he might yet come to regret is the change to the API access moving from free access to a freemium model. Where you used to be able to post an unlimited number of tweets this is now restricted – 1,500 a month for the free account, 50,000 a month for $100 and so on up.… Read the rest

How to Restore Twitter to Something Useful

January 16, 2023 | Comment

Since the takover of Twitter by Elon Musk changes have been coming thick and fast. Some, such as Twitter Blue, have been well reported and endlessly debated. Others, such as the change to the timeline, less so. It is the latter that I am going to concentrate on today.

Twitter has long tried to encourage behaviour that it wants rather than what the consumer might want. This means pushing tweets from people that you might not follow but others you follow do, in the hope that you will build your own followers. The problem with this is that you end … Read the rest

Twitter Cards Validation Error

January 26, 2015 | Comment

Twitter have had a neat feature for a while now that allows for additional information to be included with a tweet that is then displayed when you expand the tweet. This is how it looks:

And on a mobile client:

To enable these you need to set-up some meta data on your website (there is a good guide here) and then validate this information with Twitter here. When I did so I was greeted by the following message:

ERROR: FetchError:exceeded 4.seconds to Portal.Pink-constructor-safecore while waiting for a response for the request, including retries (if applicable) (Card error)

This … Read the rest

Twitter Patent = Death of App.Net?

March 21, 2013 | Comment

So Twitter have finally been granted a patent for, well, Twitter. They applied for the patent in 2007 and it has only just been granted given that these things take a while to work their way through the system.

From what I understand the patent is pretty widely worded and could be interpreted as many things and cover all multitude of sins, however, if it covered things that look like Twitter then APP.NET should be worried.

APP.NET looks and feels like Twitter and the only major difference is that it is a paid service with a limited free account also … Read the rest

How to shoot yourself in the foot

September 20, 2012 | Comment

There has been a lot of publicity in the tech press recently about changes to the terms and conditions around Twitter’s api. The changes have been made to try and strongly encourage developers of Twitter client apps to, well, basically not continue as Twitter would like to see that area as their sole domain.

Echofon, my go-to Twitter app until this morning, has clearly taken this change to heart and hit the self-destruct button early. Since releasing a new iOS version, which was supposed to bring compatibility is the latest version but seems to have had a devastating effect, many … Read the rest

If This, Then That

June 11, 2012 | Comment

Sometimes the Internet throws up a really simple but great idea that makes life much easier. If this, then that or ifttt to be more accurate, is one such idea.

ifttt allows you to create tasks where an action is carried out on some event. So, for example, when an email is received from a certain email address a copy is then forwarded automatically to another account, or when the Guardian tweets that the latest Long Good Read is available the text is sent to Instapaper. These are two examples but given the long list of services that ifttt … Read the rest

Top tech of 2010

January 16, 2011 | Comment

Last year, for the first time, I produced a list of my top tech for 2009. I thought that it would be interesting to do the same in 2010 to see how things have changed, if at all. So this is the technology that I used day-in, day-out in 2010 and could not do without.

Google Chrome

No change here and, in fact, I am more wedded to Chrome this year than I was last having used it for a full 12 months I still much prefer it to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The addition of extensions has just … Read the rest