Archive for category Projects

Day Job and Delays

Aug 19

Posted by Scott in Miscellaneous, Personal Life, Projects | 1 Comment

I know it’s been a while since I was supposed to be fixing the issues with TweetBomb.  I’ve been a bit busy with the day job and the kids getting ready for back to school, so I haven’t had much time (read: none at all) to devote to it.  Sorry for the delays.  I’ve figured out what the cause of the issue was, at least.  It looks like during the DDoS attacks that Twitter was suffering lately, their API (understandably) became somewhat unreliable.  Unfortunately, the way I had the queue system set up, I didn’t handle broken API results properly and it hosed the entire queue.

I’m going to be re-working the entire back-end portion of the system over the next couple of days.  Now that the children are back in school, I’ll probably have  more time to work on it.  When all is said and done, there will be no more queue.  Once you submit your Twitter credentials, the system should start deleting your old tweets almost immediately.  I’ll let everyone know when it’s back up and running properly.

Also, I got whitelist approval from Twitter for the app, so it should no longer go against your personal API request limit for the hour.  This means that you won’t have to worry about TweetDeck (or your other Twitter client of choice) being unable to keep up with your Twitter stream because you run out of API calls.

Again, sorry for the delays.  Look for news soon.

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TwitterSecret is back (kinda)

Jul 25

Posted by Scott in Programming, Projects | 2 Comments

When I was first learning about ColdFusion event gateways, I made a chat/Twitter bot called TwitterSecret.  Basically it was like PostSecret for Twitter.  People could send an IM to the bot and it would get posted anonymously on the TwitterSecret page on Twitter.  Unfortunately, I ended up losing my access to a dedicated server and I had to take the bot offline.

Now I’m back in a situation where I can have access to run gateway instances again, so I’m bringing TwitterSecret back.  The only problem is that Twitter has instituted a policy where no accounts can have ‘Twitter’ in the username…so they suspended my TwitterSecret account.  Thus, I was forced to rename the bot.  It is now called ‘NanoSecret’.  The name comes from nanowerx.com which is where I’m hosting the bot now.  Real quick refresher on how it works -

In order to post an anonymous message on NanoSecret, you will need to add secret@nanowerx.com to your buddy list on Google chat (or another chat service that can talk to Google chat users).  Once you do that, you can send a message of up to 140 characters to the bot, which will immediately be posted completely anonymously at the NanoSecret Twitter page.  You are limited to one post per 24 hours.

You can always follow NanoSecret on Twitter to see what everyone is posting, but if you’re the type who needs instant notification of a particular type of post you can use the alert keywords feature.  This allows you to give the NanoSecret bot a list of keywords that you want to watch for.  Any time a secret is posted to NanoSecret that contains one of your keywords, you will receive an IM from the bot telling you about it.  The alerts feature works through a list of commands that are sent to the bot via IM.  ALL commands are prefixed with a double colon (‘::’).  If you leave off the double colon, the bot will just tweet your command as a secret.  The commands are:

  • ::commands – A list of available commands you can use.  You can also use ::commands command-name to get help on a specific command
  • ::addkeyword – Follow this with a comma-delimited list of keywords you would like to watch (ie ::addkeyword monkey,socks,france)
  • ::delkeyword – Follow this with a comma-delimited list of keywords you would like to stop watching (ie ::delkeyword socks)
  • ::keywords – Displays a list of keywords you are currently watching (In my case monkey and france)
  • ::clearkeywords – Deletes your entire keyword watch list

I think that just about sums it up.  So, go add secret@nanowerx.com to your buddy list and start spilling the beans.  There are no logs kept of who posted what secret, and this is COMPLETELY anonymous.  Don’t worry, I have no means of  knowing who you are, and neither does anyone else.

I will be working on improvements to the bot today, so expect some new features to come along soon.

Update: I have added the ability to post your anonymous secrets via Direct Message on Twitter.  Just follow NanoSecret and wait until the bot follows you back. (New followers are processed every five minutes).  Once the bot is following you, you can send a standard Twitter Direct Message to NanoSecret and it will be processed within 1 minute.  As soon as your DM secret is posted, the Direct Message is deleted so I cannot go back and see who said what.

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