TechBytes » Twitter

Dawn News on twitter posting junk!

Asim Zeeshan — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:11:54 +0000

Someone handling the @Dawn_News on twitter has made a big boo boo. Please see the following (click to enlarge)

These two tweets were made with random characters in it. I guess someone in @Dawn_News owe an explanation!

Property dealers on Twitter!

Asim Zeeshan — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 12:34:44 +0000

Property dealers on Twitter!, originally uploaded by asim.zeeshan.

I just came across this tweet from a property dealer, LOL now thats news

NAGIOS 3 with notifications on twitter

Asim Zeeshan — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:00:14 +0000

I have been experimenting with NAGIOS3 on Ubuntu (I will write a how-to-install on NAGIOS later) and it has served me very good in monitoring my 7 VPS from different providers in different part of the world. I have already recorded 3 hours of downtime from ThrustVPS which is a great deal for me. I now know which VPS has the best time and which ones have hiccups (e.g. my 2Host VPS gave me two unreachable notifications but the VPS was running and still reports the uptime as 4 days).

Since I use twitter more, even when Im on the road, notifications via email is a bit slow for me. Luckily I found a great tutorial online to do that.

Twagios – Use Twitter for Nagios notifications

I registered a new twitter account for this purpose @twitgios, made its tweets private and followed this newly created account from my primary twitter account @asimzeeshan. Configured NAGIOS with twitter-nagios plugin and Viola! it now tweets status and updates as mentions to my personal account.

Twitter bird in real life

Asim Zeeshan — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:09:01 +0000

twitter bird in real life, originally uploaded by scott hampson.

In real life, would the twitter bird still be cool, or just really annoying?

Twitter’s Invalid search results again!

Asim Zeeshan — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:16:04 +0000

I blogged about Twitter’s invalid search results in an early post titled Twitter Search gone mad!. Today I noticed the same thing again when I logged in to HashPakistan‘s control panel. There are lots of invalid tweets. e.g. look at the one below

view this tweet @twitter

And there are more such tweets that came as a result of my query “#Lahore” on twitter search e.g. here and here.

HashPakistan needs an admin panel

Asim Zeeshan — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:30:49 +0000

Well, my initial estimates were wrong. I thought I could retweet the posts and Twitter would give me accurate results. The problem is with twitter results. They are giving me wrong and irrelevant results.

Also, when I ask Twitter to only send me “positive” tweets, it sometimes does not mark most of the positive tweets as “positive”, in fact they are not marked at all. So there are the “positive” tweets, “negative” tweets, “questions” and “unknown” (or “unrated”) tweets. A quick look at these tweets and I can see many of them as good ones that should have been retweeted but they were not.

To get over this situation, I need to have an admin panel where I can see statistics and possibly “approve” the negative / unrated tweets.

Having previous experience working in Zend Framework, CakePHP and CodeIgniter, I would prefer to build it in Code Igniter. I will keep this page updated with more info.

Twitter Search gone mad!

Asim Zeeshan — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 06:33:55 +0000

Yes, I know what I just said that … its true because my new project HashPakistan is using Twitter Search API to get all posts with hashtag #Pakistan and last night twitter gave it results containing #ashes (and has nothing to do with Pakistan).

I noticed it today and removed those updates from the twitter timeline. Hopefully it does not happen again.

P.S. There are no official words on the Twitter Blog regarding this

RSS Feed to Twitter

Asim Zeeshan — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:21:29 +0000

Since twitterfeed.com has not been working good for me so I started looking at alternatives and found this great post about how to do this via PHP

Read RSS Feed Mashup + Twitter = Yummy!

Twitter Down Time Rescheduled because of Iran Protests

Asim Zeeshan — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:57:06 +0000

Twitter Down Time Rescheduled because of Iran Protests, originally uploaded by asim.zeeshan.

Twitter says “A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

Our partners are taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide—we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation. We chose NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services early last year specifically because of their impeccable history of reliability and global perspective. Today’s decision and actions continue to prove why NTT America is such a powerful partner for Twitter.”

Yaller theme for DestroyTwitter, a twitter client

Asim Zeeshan — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:19:09 +0000

Yaller is one of my best DestroyTwitter theme. If you do not know about DestroyTwitter, it is a twitter client that runs on Adobe Air platform, is available for Windows and Mac alike.

Find below a screenshot of the theme when applied. (Credits to DestroyTwitter)