Twitlonger
TwitLonger is the easy way to post more than 140 characters to Twitter twitlonger.com mcyt mcytblr mcyters dteamblr dream team dteam dteamtwt georgenotfound 404blr. Open your preferred mobile app, or begin a new text message. Type or paste the URL into your Tweet. Links will be adjusted with Twitter's link shortener wherever you post them.
In a TwitLonger post, she wrote: “What happened in Taiwan was gross and disgusting and I hated it. I included details because it was my recollection but I realize those details might make him.
Archived from http://www.twitlonger.com/show/kugnol
Some notes on server uptime, accountability and the future plans for TwitLonger.
Twitlonger Deltarune
If you’ve been a longtime user of TwitLonger, you’ll probably have noticed that for a few months there was an unacceptable amount of downtime. It seemed that almost every day there was at least one instance of not being able to write or read TwitLonger posts, and at other times it was so slow that it might as well have been down. Around late August I put in place a monitoring system (pingdom.com) to alert me when the server died and hopefully help diagnose what the issue was.
Sudoku onetouch. During this time, I was constantly on top of my hosting service to try and work out what was happening (over 300 support tickets later, I’m sure they were tired of hearing from me). What I wasn’t great at was communicating to you, the users of the service, what was going on, and for that I apologise. I will address this below.
Finally, after months of investigation and increasingly frequent outages, the issue was traced to a misconfigured firewall. This was something I have no direct access to control and something that should have been picked up on much sooner by the host. The issue has now been fixed and, for the first time in over six months, I am finally seeing the sort of uptime that I would expect from TwitLonger.
Some numbers: Between August 20th, 2012 and January 18th 2013, Pingdom reported 795 instances of downtime. Some of these may have been only a minute, but some were much longer. A lot weren’t actual outages, but were times when the server was so slow it appeared to be down.
Since January 18th, i.e. the last two weeks or so, there has been a single outage, which was due to a server restart on the 30th. Apart from that, TwitLonger has reported 100% uptime. Which is nice. Hopefully, everything will stay that way. If you’ve been frustrated by the performance of the site, I am truly sorry and hope the improvements that have been seen over the last couple of weeks mean you don’t have the same frustration in the future.
Now, accountability. Many people think TwitLonger is a big site, with big VC funding and a team working on it night and day. It isn’t. TwitLonger is run by a single person (that’s me, @stuartgibson on Twitter) and it isn’t a full time job (I have one of those as well, plus a family). It means that I haven’t always been on top of things as I should be and haven’t been as communicative as I should be either, especially with things like downtime. I’m going to try much harder at this and make it more obvious when things are happening, and just to generally keep people abreast of TwitLonger and what’s happening with it.
The first thing I will be doing is putting up a public status page for site performance and availability. It will have it’s own page under the TwitLonger domain shortly (independent of the actual site so that site issues don’t affect the status page). In the meantime, you can see it at http://stats.pingdom.com/2tvs1qas4x5b/630555
Next, I’m going to start trying to get more feedback from you, the site users. The feature set of TwitLonger has remained pretty constant since its inception and I believe the simplicity of the service is one thing that has helped it be so popular. However, there are a few things that are frequently requested, as well as a few areas that need tidied up. I definitely want to solicit feature requests though. I will most likely put up a poll for some of the more common ones, but if you have any particular requests, you can email them to hello@twitlonger.com
Twitlonger Lilypichu
So, the future.
There are some things I need to address before adding features. Firstly will be a rewrite of a lot of the main code to make sure everything is ready for Twitter’s 1.1 API which will be required from March. This will also give a much more solid base from which to build out additional functionality. At this time, I will also be putting into place a more mobile friendly design for the post page.
After that, I will be adding or improving features that make sense for the service based mostly on the feedback I receive. As I said, let me know what would make things better for you.
I will also be trying to respond on Twitter to requests as best I can. If it’s a general site thing, I will usually reply from the @TwitLonger account and if it’s a support issue it will usually be from @tlsupport
Thanks for reading,
Stuart