Twitter updates

[Andreas Jonsson]

A twitter feed is now available for all photos submitted to the Bird Photo Corner. Please follow it here:

http://twitter.com/TorontoBirdPics

Only initial posts are tweeted. Follow-up posts do not generate a twitter message.

EDIT:  Service change as of September 2011.

Please note that this is a not a real-time service. Typically there is a delay of 5-60 minutes between submission on the message board and arrival on twitter. The delay depends on the performance of on-line web services such as pipes.yahoo.com, twitterfeed.com and twitter.com.

Any feedback on this service is welcome.

There is also a twitter feed for the Toronto Reports section.

Learn more about twitter here:

http://twitter.com/
http://www.youtube.com/

[Scott]

Great idea Andreas....I'm now a follower

[Mathew Rossi]

Very cool, I'm in!

[Andreas Jonsson]

I'm glad you like the idea! I created it since I thought it would be convenient not having to keep coming back to the site to look for new posts all the time.

Let me know f you experience any issues.

[Andreas Jonsson]

The twitter feed has been up for soon 9 months now and there are currently 47 followers:

http://twitter.com/#!/TorontoBirdPics/followers

I'm sure many of you will be please to know that current followers include Kenn Kaufman, Birding Magazine, and birders from around the world, e.g Germany, Uganda, Japan.

[lucilley]

How do I stop Twitter from updating on my Facebook? I have my twitter account set up to where it sends my twitter updates to my facebook as well. How do i stop that?
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[mr.sharp-photo]

my suggestion:

each tweet that links to this page should end with "#birds".  makes things more searcheable.

[Andreas Jonsson]

The Twitter feed is currently misbehaving; a new tweet is produced for every new comment added, not for every new thread created, as designed. I believe this is due to a recent major update of the Yahoo Pipes web engine that the alert system relies on. There is no quick fix available. I need to properly diagnose what is going on. Please be patient. This should probably also affect the Toronto Reports Twitter feed, but as there are less comments there it might not have shown yet.

Thanks to Mr Sharp for alerting me to this issue.

IMHO we really should be thinking about updating the software for this board. It is many generations out of date. Newer  phpBB versions will allow nifty little plugins that provide all sorts of subscriptions and alert variants. The twitter thing I set up is a pretty crude hack that scrapes the board for changes every 30 minutes.

[Andreas Jonsson]

Dear twitter users. Due to a major software update over at Yahoo Pipes, the Twitter updates here on the board are no longer working as intended. The service was designed to tweet once for every new thread posted. With the new Yahoo Pipes engine, however, the same thread is tweeted multiple times, generally (but not always) for each new reply in a given thread.  

I have spent a fair bit of time trying and correct this problem, but I have not been able to. This type of functionality would be easy to provide if the message board was running on a more modern forum software platform like phpBB  v3 or similar, while my "hack" is rather complex and difficult to maintain. So, I've decided not to research this further.

I'll leave the twitter feed on, but please understand that it is not working as intended. Thanks for your understanding.

[Andreas Jonsson]

Thanks to Andy's addition of news feeds to the forum I am now turning on the twitter feed for the Bird Photo Corner again. You'll find it here:

https://twitter.com/#!/TorontoBirdPics

The new twitter feed only updates for new posts, i.e. not for comments. Enjoy.