This service has really taken off since the fatality on Friday May 6th and with this morning’s rumored fire on a train outside Mountain View. With all the new traffic has brought to light some deficiencies with my service let alone any issues Twitter may be having. Because of this I decided to create this dumb blog to better communicate updates. This is in addition to the mailing list that already exists.

Because of the service issues with Twitter I’ve had to actually code in some robustness to my API calls. At the moment I don’t attempt a resend on error (by design), but with the frequency of delays and the number of followers I’ve reconsidered. I have also successfully implemented a method that will redirect Twitter direct messages. This means you will be able to send a direct message via SMS to Twitter and have that be the update. The only hangup is I will need to build an actual user portal on my site to sufficiently link your Twitter account with your email key. Not being a web designer at all (not even a little bit) I’ve been putting this off. Everyone hope for a slow work week for me and I’ll get something done.

Last I am now filtering updates that match (^\w\w:) to weed out people who reply-to all after a few of those were sent out this morning.

Also I wanted to thank everyone for contributing and hopefully this has alleviated some frustration Caltrain commuters have.

Edit: Of course I had to publish the URL for the blog as http://cow.org/c/blog/ BEFORE I looked into this WordPress thing. It seems it has its own ‘About’ page which seemed to be a suitable replacement for the old index page. That said the blog replaced it and is now at http://cow.org/c/ but I put a Apache RedirectPermanent option so all is good.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Announcement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.