Statistics for Twitter
Filed Under Twitter | 2008-08-28, 18:07
Anyone else out there a statistics junkie? Yes, I’m looking at you, the one with a last.fm account who’s adamant about scrobbling every last mp3 you play so you can generate fancy charts. Well if you’re a Twitter user, you’ll be happy to know about Tweetrush. Tweetrush is a site that will spit back statistics on how many twitters/tweets you sent, what time of the day you send them, etc. Currently they’re only showing stats for the last 7 days, but they’re using data from Gnip, which parses Twitter’s full data feed of all the tweets. This means they could theoretically parse more data as long as they have the servers to handle it. Want to see my (weak) stats? If you’re missing out on my low traffic Twitter, you can follow me here.
However TweetRush isn’t just a fun little Twitter site. It’s a test of the new RushHour engine, an analytics system for measuring actions and events as opposed to raw page views and clicks. RushHour might be just the thing that many sites are looking for to get a more detailed analysis of how people use their site. Unfortunately it’s under a closed beta right now, but you can apply to get into that beta over at rushhouranalytics.com.
Zappos + Twitter
Filed Under Geek, Twitter | 2008-05-07, 11:36
Looks like Zappos is doing a Twitter experiment while they’re in town visiting the Twitter offices. Not sure what they’re up to, but I’m game.
The original twitter:
If you r in San Fran area, write “Zappos” on back of left hand w/ marker & twitter @zappos link to picture of it. Why? Details to come, 4 PM
Post to Twitter when you post to your blog
Filed Under Twitter, Wordpress | 2008-02-25, 12:15
I don’t like doing things manually when I can have software do my bidding. Usually I’ll send a twitter when I have a new blog post on here that I think people are interested in. (I recognize not everyone has my RSS feed in their feed reader…yet) But it’s a manual process and an extra step, so I went out and found Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin. Alex King is a name forever associated in my head with WordPress, primarily for his help in finding themes back in the early days of WP. This plugin is pretty full-featured:
- Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 15 minutes)
- Create a blog post from each of your tweets
- Create a daily digest post of your tweets
- Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post
- Post a tweet from your sidebar
- Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens
- Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)
I’ve currently got it set up to send to twitter when a post goes live on here. So in theory, when this post went live, it should have shown on my Twitter page.
UPDATE: Looks like Twitter Tools will post any edits to a posts if that blog post has not been twittered yet. Sorry for the twitter flood when I removed the “Uncategorized” category from a couple old posts. I’m going to look into manually adding the “twittered” metadata to all my posts so it doesn’t happen again.
UPDATE 2: Threw together a quick little php script to update the database so old posts aren’t twittered when they’re edited. YMMV, User beware, no warranty, etc. You’ll want to make a backup of your databases, then fill in your username, password, and database_name and then run this either from command line or via the browser.
/*--------code start--------*/ mysql_connect(localhost, "db_username", "db_password"); mysql_select_db("database_name"); $res1 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM wp_posts p WHERE (p.post_status LIKE \"publish\")"); while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($res1, MYSQL_ASSOC)) { //find out if the TwitterTools metadata has already been written $sql2 = "SELECT * FROM wp_postmeta WHERE (post_id = ".$row['ID'].") && (meta_key LIKE \"aktt_tweeted\") && (meta_value LIKE \"1\")"; print "Post ID: ".$row['ID']."
\n"; if (!mysql_numrows(mysql_query($sql2))) { //metadata not found, let's fake it without twittering $sql = "INSERT INTO wp_postmeta (post_id, meta_key, meta_value) VALUES (".$row['ID'].",\"aktt_tweeted\",1)"; mysql_query($sql); print " -- added metadata to fake it.
\n"; } else { print " -- already been twittered.
\n"; } } /*--------code end--------*/
RIP Dodgeball?
Filed Under Websites | 2007-04-25, 14:21
With the departure of the Dodgeball founders, and no indication that Google wants to improve it for months, it looks like curtains for Dodgeball are imminent. Dodgeball.com is currently returning a Google 502 Server Error. Generally a 502 error indicates too much traffic or server overload. We find it hard to believe that the failing Dodgeball is encountering this. Even if there is something wrong with the site, will Google invest the resources to fix it, or is Google finally ready to pull the plug? How in the world am I going to let people know where I am?!? It’s a good thing we’ve still got twitter.