How did it come about
Well as you may know I set up FootyTweets few years ago, a football news/updates service on Twitter. It started out because I wanted to get Reading FC news and score alerts on Twitter. So I started out doing it manually. After a few days I decided to set up a script to do it for me, but what about all the other teams? Well thats where FootyTweets came from.

I’ve had a fair bit of contraversy with FootyTweets and its or reltations: MotorTweets, CricketTweets and RugbyTweets. All of these came about due to the way “old media” see anyone using their copyright without their permission. Different companies/organisations treat their copyright and trademark in one of two ways:

• Old media: Send the person in breech of copyright a Cease & Desist letter (like I received)
• New media: Embrace the person that is giving them extra publicity and promoting the copyright holder

Anyway, as you can see from the Cease & Desist letter I received, all the clubs and governing bodies have a very obvious old media stance.

What happened with Reading FC then?
Well, Reading FC were the first team to make contact with me and ask to speak on the phone. I immediately knew the issue was Twitter related and was most likely just ringing to ask for the Twitter account I was using for Reading (@ReadingFC). Which I would be fine about since I’d rather not go to court because I wouldn’t change an account name. Twitter themselves have their rules about using other peoples trademarks and I wouldn’t stand a chance!

But… I was really surprised to speak to the Craig, the Head of Communications and Reading FC and he did just want the Twitter account name, which we had swapped over within 10 minutes of the phone call ending (my account changed to @Unofficial_RFC). But what I didn’t expect was him to thank me for running the account for so long. Not only that but he offered me the chance to go into the press area for any matches I like!

Let’s backtrack a second
A football club thanked me for using their trademark because it was benefiting the club. Craig specifically mentioned the term “new media” too. I wish more clubs like DC United and New York Red Bulls (Both in the MLS) would have done the same rather than sending me harsh e-mails or going to Twitter directly to take over an account.

Conclusion
You might well support someone else, but you have to admire what Reading FC have done. If it is possible, then I am a bigger fan that I was this time last week.

Whats wrong with Apple?
Anyway… I have become increasingly pissed off with the wall that Apple puts around their products and the applications people can build on top of them.

Apple have their very well oiled marketing machine that everyone eats up and gets involved with. For instance, from an average persons persepective the queues at the Apple Stores when a product launches is just because the product is that popular. That may well be the case, but from someone who can see through the marketing you can see what Apple is actually doing… Why serve people so slowly when people have been outside for hours… Oh yeah, to make sure there is a huge fuss made the media! Drives me nuts that people fall for it everytime, wait a day and then go in and there is no queue!!

Instead of making me want to wait for the new iPhone to come out Apple actually made me look at the alternatives. As people who follow me on Twitter will know, I loved the idea of the Google Nexus One and saw myself getting it on Vodafone UK when it came out. I subscribed to the rubbish marketing e-mails to get news of its launch. But after seeing that you have to basically pay £5 a month extra just because it is a nexus one really pissed me off again.

A few people had told be about the HTC Desire and I did plenty of research on it and basically the only difference between the Desire and Nexus One is there is no background noise cancellation microphone on the back. That and the fact you need to rely on HTC to give you Android updates.

HTC Desire baby!
After mulling it over for a few weeks I decided to get the Desire on O2 as I had been on their iPhone simplicity deal with free data. Except thats not exactly how I did it. My Girlfriend Hannah had a really old brick and she had started coming round to the idea that the iPhone might actually be a good phone for her to use. So she upgraded her contract to get the Desire, I still get the simplicity deal, she gets my old iPhone, I get the Desire and I pay the difference in contract prices. All that to get the free “unlimited” data!

Whats so amazing about Android?
Back to Android… AWESOME! What an awesome Operating System. From a developers point of view you can build an app that can replace virtually anything on the phone. Want to make your own keypad? Browser? Home screen? Lock screen? You can! Can you do any of those on apple? NO BLOODY WAY!

I’m currently building my first two apps (kind of in parallel) to get to grips with development  but as it uses Java and I did a bit for my degree it is really easy to get going. There is nothing to pay (untill you want to put anything into the market) and you can debug on your device rather than having to pay Apple $100 for the benefit!

Catching up
Although not all the “major brands” have jumped on the bandwagon yet I can imaging lots of them planning it at the moment. The next release of Android is set to have a lot better UI tools and make it easier and simpler to customise the look and feel of the device and apps so that may help the bigger brands get on board easier.

At the moment I can only find one other downside: Apps that stay open and drain battery. But there is a solution… get a tast killer. But just be careful… Don’t kill the clock app as your alarms won’t go off! I found that out the hard way.

Are you a #AppleFan or a #DroidFan? Talk to me in the comments!

First of all I think it is important to note that I have never received any training when it comes to PHP, MySQL or Apache. I have just finished a degree course but that was mainly Java.

This post is done from a web services point of view, not a developer reading an RSS feed . Anyway! I have recently moved servers to Linode, which I would highly recommend if you know your way around Linux. I moved all my small sites like this blog, Hootware, H1 Debate, Love Hate Marmite etc onto the new box and everything was running fine as they don’t have much traffic and on every blog I host I use WP-Supercache.

The problem

But when I moved FootyTweets over and got it all running I noticed that after about 10mins apache had ground to a hault and clogged up the server. It took me a good 20mins to figure out what had been going on. I didn’t realise it but almost every second there are people out there that refresh about 20 RSS feeds from FootyTweets. As I had never anticipated many people would use the RSS feeds I never thought to cache them. This was baaad news!

Every time an RSS feed was requested it went to the database, requested x recent news items and made an RSS feed from them. Now the news feeds only get checked every half an hour, so after the first feed requested in that 30 minute slot I was simply wasting database connections and processing time doing the same SQL statement.

MY solution

This is when I jumped into action. I know there are different ways of caching but my favourite way is a bit similar to WP-Supercache, which is simply save a static copy of the RSS feed so a file when the first request is made. Then all subsequent requests simply check to see if a cached version exists, if it doesn’t it will create the file, otherwise it will simply server up the static file. Then whenever a news item comes in the RSS feed for that team is deleted ready t be recreated.

And the people rejoiced

As soon as I put this back into action the server was back to normal and apache seemed to appreciate the effort I went into to create the cache.

As I’d done this type of caching of files before it only took me about 10-15mins to implement, but the first time it took a bit of figuring out.

Just as I said before, this is not the only way there are other services that can do the same thing. Everything that was written above was my own opinion .

After several months of long nights of programming on Red Bull, vast amounts of chocolate and attempting not to neglect my lovely girlfriend Hannah. HootMonitor is finally out in beta form!

So you might be wondering what HootMonitor is. Well to put it incredibly simple its website monitoring for Twitter. But to go into a longer explanation I am going to grab  quote from the about page:

Want to know when your website goes down? How about being notified with a Twitter direct message, e-mail or an SMS? How about some statistics too? HootMonitor can do it all. To set your site up just follow the 3 simple steps above (see the homepage for the images). Or watch the video tour below.

This is the first site I have done based on the “Freemium” business model. Basically you HootMonitor offers basic the basic web monitoring service for free, while charging a premium for advanced/special features.

The easiest way to check out HootMonitor is to login with your Twitter/Facebook account and have a look. Or you can see the introductory video below. Or see it on YouTube.

Did you know that Twitter attempted to secretly release a new feature to a small percentage of users (less than 5%)? The chances are that you did, but if you didn’t check out this Mashable article about Twitter Lists. They will be releasing the lists feature to 5% of people over the next few weeks.

When Twitter release new features, or are planning a new feature, they give developers new API methods to test out. This was the case for Lists. Developers have been given access to a draft API documentation.

So with a combination of being one of the small fraction of users given access to Lists I also saw the draft Lists API, I thought I could make an app as proof of concept of what can be done. The result was ListLeages.

One of my old Twitter apps TwitterLeague (which I no longer own or operate) was built before Lists was even an idea and so if you wanted to create a league of Twitter users you had to login to Twitterleague and add users individually. But now with ListLeagues you can create your lists on Twitter and turn them into leagues by matching the uri (the bit after http://twitter.com)

So for instance I have a league at http://twitter.com/ollieparsley/hootware. If I wanted to create a league from this list all I do is substitute twitter.com for listleagues.com. So the URL would become http://listleagues.com/ollieparsley/hootware

Alternatively you can see w

What is the Twitter Developer Nest?

It’s a great place for Twitter developers, potential developers and Twitter enthusiasts to get together, hear what each other is doing, drink lots of free beer and eat lots of free pizza!

Why do I like it?

Anyone that knows me knows that I am a bit of a serial Twitter app developer. Just look at my projects page to see what sort of app I develop. Most of my friends don’t really know much about what I do apart from “being a geek”. So coming to an event like this where everyone is on the same page and being such a niche group of UK (mainly) Twitter developers, its great to be a part of.

Highlights

All the talks were great and it is a bit bad of me to only choose a couple of presentations, but to hell with it! Here are my favourite 2 apps.

@picfog

Think the Live TweetMeme stream of links, but for photos instead. Just visit picfog.com to see exactly what I mean. I was very impressed with the speed and realising that noone has done anything similar, imagine the possibilities of breaking news from a photo (like the Hudson plane crash) but you see it straight away rather than waiting for the viral effect of Retweets. See photos from the Developer Nest on picfog.com

@twase

@jchivers presented Twase, the awesome Twitter Spam engine. It’s along the lines of what Akismet is to WordPress (except Akismet is owned by WordPress and installed by default!). Twase is a developer tool for checking to see if a user is full of spam! Ok its a lot more complicated then that, but check out twase.com for more info. Check out the presentation.

@twfeed

I was looking forward to this talk from @mario, the creator of TwitterFeed as soon as I saw the schedule. Check out the presentation for more.

HootMonitor

Amongst all the presentations going on there are 8 “show and tells” these are 140 second demos/presentations by anyone who wants to showcase what they have done. I chose to do a quick demo of my latest Twitter app caleed HootMonitor. It’s almost ready and you can see more at HootMonitor.com or follow @HootMonitor on Twitter.

Live stream!

There was a live stream up on Ustream.tv that I have included below. If you want to see my HootMonitor demo, skip to the last two minutes of the video!

Ok so you might have just dropped it in some shallow water. Here is what you should do in the “rules according to Ollie”. Obviously if you have dropped it in water and have taken the time to find this blog post then it is probably too late for you. But if you are reading this for info then follow these rules:

1. Get it out the water! By now you will be getting odd messages saying “This accessory is not compatible with iPhone” (like below)
2. Wrap it in a towel to get the surface water off
3. Put the phone on a coat in the footwell of your car
4. Drive a long distance, whist:
   1. Blasting heat into the footwell of the passenger seat
   2. Opening the windows so you don’t boil
5. Sorted!

There you go. That was exactly what I did on Friday morning and it worked perfectly when I got to the end of the journey. The only thing I am not sure about is insurance. Although I obviously have needed to make a claim, internally there would be signs of water damage which would make the insurance invalid. I am hoping to get clrification on Monday when I take a trip to the O2 store.

It’s just under 5 minutes long and you can download the MP3 if you like. Or put the RSS feed into iTunes (or another generic player) to receive it as a podcast . I hope its not too boring!

Download audio file (001.mp3)

Thanks.

Ollie

After attending the Twitter Developer Nest (which I recommend you attend), where I talked about FootyTweets (see my presentation here), there was a discussion about how the Twitter API handles user avatars.

The main problem is that the URL that is given in the API is a direct URL to the image. So if the user changes their image after your API call is done, you will get a broken image/404.

I have this problem with TwitterLeague and have to run a 30 minute update to check for users avatars. This also means that an avatar could be broken for up to 30 minutes. In Twitter land this is obviously a long time.

So Twavatars (twitter.com/twavatarsapi) is my solution. Whenever you want to display a users avatar instead of doing an API call you instead use a Twavatar URL, this collects the relevant users image (depending on the size) and returns an image. This means the URL can be used directly in an <img>.

This is an example URL (i am looking at getting a domain name):
http://twavatars.info/user/10721822?s=thumb

It returns this image:

I think its a nice way of handling Twitter avatars. If you want to know more please head to http://twavatars.info

But I did have an awesome time at the Twitter Developer Nest. I am briefly going to summarise the parts of the day that really got me thinking.

Zolty
The first presentation was by @zolty where he showed us BakerTweet and how he used an Arduino unit to create a tool that was installed at the Bakery over the road from his office. The unit sends out a tweet when a baker takes something out the overn, chooses the item on the unit and presses the send button.

It was a really great presentation and really opens up the number of opportunities for this unit. Zolty did mention that there is a unit being tested at London Zoo where a tweet will be sent out when an animal is being fed.

ME!
I spoke second and talked about my various Twitter apps but went on to talk in-depth about the FootyTweets Cease and Desist issues. I have included the presentation below.

Doug Williams
@dougw is part of the Twitter API team and focuses on support. He breifly went into some of the technical details into why there have been problems since Aston Kutcher and Oprah (with a lot of other factors) increased Twitters traffic exponentially.

He also answered a number of questions from the audience. There were a few issues that were raised including Twitter Avatars and syncing.

Paul Johnston
Paul (@PaulDJohnston) did a really interesting talk about Transient and Persinstant data on Twitter. It was quote in-depth and he went into how to best make use of Twitter avatars. I have embedded his presentation below.

Show & Tweet
After the main talks it was time for show and tweet, you have 140 seconds to talk about your app. I can only remember a couple of the demos so please accept my appologies if your app isn’t listed. Please tell me in the comments!

• TweetMeme API
• Peepwl
• TweetRaffle (in development)
• TwitApps

Then it was off to the pub! I did get to talk to a number of people and would really like to thank everyone there who talked to me but in particular @stut. We discussed Twitter apps and scaling for almost 2 hours and barely stopped for air!