Today I'm happy to announce that SweetTweets (both the stand-alone cfc, and the Mango plugin) have been updated and are available for download.
Huge, huge, huge hat tip to Ray Camden, who brought this proejct to my attention. After deconstructing how it worked, I was able to rip out the old search method that SweetTweets did and replace it with the same technology. If you're curious about the tech, I'll get into it a little bit after the download links.
For now, the short version of the story is that link reverse lookups are finally possible -- which means that ANY url shortening service* can be used, and you'll still get your tweetbacks... Yes, even bit.ly!
SweetTweetsCFC users can download version 2.0 from the Riaforge project page. Mango Blog plugin users can get the latest version here:
- Plugin:
- SweetTweets
- Version:
- 2.0
- Requires:
- Mango Blog 1.2+
- Auto-install URL:
- http://fusiongrokker.com/get/SweetTweets
How does it work?
There's a service available called Topsy that has their own API, including reverse-lookup for links -- essentially exactly what I was looking for in my last post about Tweetbacks. And since we don't have to lookup and cache what the short url's are, you should notice that SweetTweets is much faster than previous versions. The only thing I rewrote was the search tech. Local caching and AJAX access are more or less untouched.
If you were using custom code to implement SweetTweetsCFC, you'll notice that the getTweetbacksHTML and init methods have two new optional arguments allowing you to specify the header text for when there are or are-not tweetbacks found. I'm pretty sure that's about the only interface change. The data returned should be roughly the same. Oh, and I updated the links that it adds to hashtags to use search.twitter.com instead of hashtags.org, which is the new standard; and I also fixed a bug where only the first hashtag in the tweet would be converted to a link.
Using Topsy does have its own limitations. They limit results to 50 tweets per page, and I don't see the need to implement paging, so at the moment the most you can get back is the 50 most recent tweets.
*I'm not sure if shorteners that add a "bar" (frame?) to the page will work. This includes services like ow.ly (the shortener used in HootSuite).
in
Mango |
My projects |
2 Responses
Posted 2010-02-11 11:20
Mango 1.4.3 has been released, and is available via automatic update. As far as I know, the only difference between 1.4.2 and 1.4.3 is a fix for a bug I reported with the new logging functionality.
Version 1.4.2 of Mango introduced logging to the database and gets rid of the old web-accessible log files. Users of LogViewer will need to update the plugin in order to manage their logs.
This update to LogViewer reflects some changes to the way logging works. In particular, there are now several different types of errors, not just two. For now, all errors are displayed together -- but I may change that later to let you specify just one type to display. I may also add pagination, if there is a demand for it.
- Plugin:
- LogViewer
- Version:
- 1.1
- Requires:
- Mango Blog 1.4.3+
- Auto-install URL:
- http://fusiongrokker.com/get/LogViewer
Users still on an older version of Mango (pre 1.4.2) can still download LogViewer 1.0.
LogViewer source is now hosted on GitHub.
in
ColdFusion |
Mango |
My projects |
7 Responses
Posted 2010-02-04 09:44
As promised, today I'm releasing a new version of Scribe that makes use of my new PowerMail plugin, if available. As I said yesterday, this new version will send email from and to you -- the author -- but BCC to your subscribers. Doing so will cut the number of messages sent by up to a factor of 100. In addition if you use Google Mail for your domain, as I do, then using PowerMail to route outbound email through gmail will make your messages look less spammy to the receiving mail server than if you used some other mail relaying service.
I've also fixed a bug where the link included in the double opt-in activation email led to a page that didn't render (though the activation was still successful).
Enjoy, and as always, please submit bug reports and feature requests via the RIAForge project page.
- Plugin:
- Scribe
- Version:
- 1.4
- Requires:
- Mango Blog 1.3+
- Auto-install URL:
- http://fusiongrokker.com/get/Scribe
in
Mango |
My projects |
No Responses Yet
Posted 2010-01-14 09:30
PowerMail is a Mango Blog plugin that improves on the mail utility
included with Mango. In particular, it adds BCC support (useful for
plugin developers who want to send email with a BCC), and enables you
to connect to SMTP servers that require SSL or TLS authentication
and/or a custom port number; including GMail and Google Mail for
Domains.
in
Mango |
My projects |
8 Responses
Posted 2010-01-13 09:30
A little bit less than a year ago I created an open source CFC and companion Mango Blog plugin called SweetTweets that would search for shortened links to your blog entries on Twitter and display any tweets found in a manner similar to TrackBacks. (Note that this wasn't my idea, Dan Zarella invented and pioneered it, I just made a ColdFusion version.) At the time, I was really excited about the project and it seemed to be fairly popular; it even got included in the BlogCFC core, which made my week.
Unfortunately, I'm at a bit of a crossroads. I personally view TweetBacks as nearly dead, if not completely dead. Functionally, they still work the same as they did when I originally released SweetTweets in January of 2009. What's changed is market share. In May, Twitter switched their integrated URL shortening service from TinyURL to Bitly, and within days Bitly's market share overtook TinyURL. You can get the latest statistics at Tweetmeme but the rankings from the last 24 hours have Bitly in 1st place with over 57% of shortened urls, and TinyURL in a distant 2nd place with a mere 6.85%.
Why Bit.ly is bad for TweetBacks
The biggest problem is that Bitly doesn't repeat a short URL. If I shorten the URL http://www.google.com with Bitly, I get http://bit.ly/14d7yE. I bet that if you do the same thing, you won't get the same short URL. This behavior is bad for tweetbacks because we rely on being able to predict the shortened url and search for it. If everyone gets a different short url, then we can't predict what it will be, and thus we can't search for it. Your tweetback is out there, we just can't find it.
This isn't to say that Bitly is evil or anything. I'm sure they have their reasons -- chief among them is probably being able to track click statistics, and if everyone gets the same short url then there's no easy way to tell whose post of that url was the source of the click. That alone could give Twitter something to monetize, so while I'm not particularly fond of the move from TinyURL to Bitly, I understand it.
Where do we go from here?
One option is to just kill SweetTweets. That probably won't happen. Instead, I will probably release an update that pares down the list of supported url shorteners to just TinyURL and Is.Gd. That means that a majority of potential tweetbacks will still be un-searchable, and therefore NOT found and NOT listed on your blog. Unfortunately, we can't just support every URL shortener under the sun (that keeps 1 unique short url per long url), because the twitter search API has a length limit; so we can only support the top N. Right now that's TinyURL and maybe 1 or 2 others.
I wish it didn't have to come to this, but it has. I thought about asking if anyone is aware of a way to reverse-lookup shortened bitly urls, but even if we could, in a practical sense we would run out of room in just a few links. I'm a little sad, but I guess this is the best we can do with what we've got.
in
Mango |
My projects |
Twitter |
4 Responses
Posted 2010-01-04 10:57
