Fixed at Error twitters

Today I fixed my "at Error" twitters, since they even were annoying myself. I'm looking forward to work with the pownce API soon, since the guys already have some stuff going on.

At the moment I'm using plazer to update my twitter and plazes status, but I'm looking for an alternative. I wanna be able to update it using a desktop client, a web client and from my mobile phone.

Twittering with Plazes Fix

My Plazes status seems to be updated multiple times on Twitter, that's why I decided to tweak Paul's script a little and check if my status changed, before actually updating Twitter. This should prevent multiple updates on Twitter.

If you are interested here's the source code.

Twittering with Plazes

This is another installment of integrating Twitter and Plazes. I finally managed to post twitters using my Plazes rss feed.

I found this little neat php script, written by Paul. I adopted it to suit my needs and let it run by a cron job on my server. It basically grabs my Plazes feed and pushs it to Twitter. It's quite simple.

I'm still tweaking on the frequency of publishing to Twitter, I guess every 20 minutes or so should be okay.

Yahoo pipes for integration

On my quest for integrating Twitter and Plazes with my blog, I'm using Yahoo pipes now. Yahoo describes pipes as follows:

Pipes is an interactive data aggregator and manipulator that lets you mashup your favorite online data sources.

I'm using pipes to manipulate the Plazes rss feed, which contains my location and my status, to create the little sentence you can see in my presence box. Therefore I leverage JSON to access the pipe data. It works very well and I don't have any delays, unlike using Google's AJAX Feed API. Another advantages is that I didn't have to code JavaScript. The pipe's editor was fairly easy to use and I had my pipe up and running in less than an hour.

Google AJAX Feed API delays

When I tried to integrate the new plazes rss feed with blogger, my first approach was to used Google's AJAX Feed API. It's straightforward and you don't need to code a lot in order to read and use feed data.

The major problem of the Google's API, though, is a delay in updates. The feed you consume through the API will be fetched by Google's "Feedfetcher" infrequently, which means you'll get cached data if it hasn't been fetched for a while. The documentation states that the frequency of fetching feeds is "less than once every hour". My experience was, that it fetches feeds about every 6 hours. That's way to slow for a Twitter like behaviour.

The Google AJAX Feed API is also used for Google Reader, which is also kinda slow in updating feeds.

Rss to Twitter

I like Twitter a lot, but it's on and off is really annoying. So I decided to use Plazes instead and update my status there. Since I don't wanna get rid of Twitter at all, I'm looking for a way to publish my Plazes status through it's rss feed on Twitter.

There are two sites which are providing such a service and unfortunately both of them are not working! I don't know if it's Twitter itself or the rss to Twitter sites though.

The first site I used was rss2twitter. It didn't work at all. Over a period of 18 hours it had not updated my status once. Then I switched to twitterfeed, which only have published one update in about 24 hours.

Revamped Plazes

The new Plazes had been released while I was on holidays, so it was time to check it out. My conclusion: I love it! It still got some bugs e.g. the new Plazer freezes from time to time, but I guess they are working on it. A major drawback for me is that they haven't updated their APIs yet.

I really like the group feature cause it brings some kind of social networking thinggy to Plazes. Another cool thing is the twitter-like status that you can set by Plazer, web or SMS. I really hope the Plazes guys give some thought to their APIs, so that all data will be easily accessible.

At the moment I'm working on integrating the new Plazes with Twitter and my presence box.

plazes API flaw

There is a flaw in the plazes API, when using the method user.trazes. It returns the specified user's whereabouts, grouped by day and ordered ascending by age. I think the ordering is a flaw. The grouping is okay, but I think it should order the plazes descending to tell me that yesterday night I was at home (dave's), today I was at the office (Netpioneer GmbH) and now I'm home again and exactly in that order.

I want to implemented a "last seen" feature for my presence box and with the ordering of the plazes api, I have to implement a lot of logic to get it right. To clarify what I mean a set of sample data:

name | connected | disconnected
Netpioneer GmbH | 20070328T07:36:51 | 20070328T16:43:50
dave's | 20070328T20:16:11 | 20070328T20:33:34
dave's | 20070328T20:37:56 | 20070328T22:01:08
Hauptbahnhof Karlsruhe | 20070328T22:02:59 | 20070328T22:03:31
Netpioneer GmbH | 20070327T07:26:27 | 20070327T16:47:55
dave's | 20070327T18:23:03 | 20070327T23:29:55
Netpioneer GmbH | 20070326T07:28:03 | 20070326T17:46:18
dave's | 20070326T20:53:14 | 20070327T00:01:43

To get my "last seen" location I need to iterate through the set of data comparing dates, which is very messy and ugly! I hope the guys at plazes will implement something like a "last seen" method in the future. Until then I'll have to get messy and hack it myself.

Integrating Twitter and plazes

Today I integrated Twitter and plazes into my blog, you can see it on the "presence" box at the sidebar. Integrating Twitter is pretty straightforward, since they are providing a javascript snippet that you can simply drop into your html code.


<script type="text/javascript">
function twitterCallback(obj) {
var id = obj[0].user.id;
document.getElementById('my_twitter_status').innerHTML = obj[0].text;
document.getElementById('my_twitter_status_time').innerHTML = obj[0].relative_created_at;
}
</script>
<span id="my_twitter_status"></span> <span id="my_twitter_status_time"></span>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.twitter.com/t/status/user_timeline/
917241?callback=twitterCallback&count=1"></script>

Integrating plazes is not so simple though, at least if you want to do it text-based, without any flash widget. They provide an API, which you can only use after you registered a developer key, which I did. Unfortunately the developer key is not working, so I'm still waiting for support to get back to me. In the mean time I adopted a wordpress-plugin that was written by Tijs Teulings. The plazes API is based on XMLRPC. I think that makes integration via javascript quite messy, so I decided to use a php indirection which handles all the XMLRPC stuff for me.

include("xmlrpc.inc");
$location = askPlazes($plazes_username, $plazes_password_hash);

if ($location['plazecity'] == "o" || $location['plazecity'] == "o" || $location['plazename'] == "o") {
echo $_GET['callback'] . "(null);";
} else {
echo $_GET['callback'] . "({ \"plazes\": { \"city\": \"" . $location['plazecity'] . "\", \"name\": \"". $location['plazename'] . "\", \"url\": \"". $location['plazeurl'] . "\" } });";
}

function askPlazes($username, $passwordMD5) {
$c=new xmlrpc_client("/xmlrpc/whereami.php", "beta.plazes.com", 80);
$params = array(new xmlrpcval($username, "string"), new xmlrpcval($passwordMD5, "string"));
$f = new xmlrpcmsg('plazes.whereami', $params);
$r = $c->send($f);
$v = $r->value();

if ($r->faultCode()) {
echo "Plazes XML-RPC Fault: ";
echo "Code: " . $r->faultCode() . " Reason '" .$r->faultString()."'";
exit;
} else {
$PlazesData = php_xmlrpc_decode($v);
return $PlazesData;
}
}

It uses a xmlrpc library to make a call to a deprecated plazes API called "whereami". The call basically returns your current plaze with all necessary information. For javascript integration the php script prints a function call, which is provided as parameter when calling the script. To integrate this into my blog, I simply had to drop in a javascript snippet which includes the call to the php script and an implemention of the callback method.

function plazes(obj) {
if (obj != null) {
document.getElementById('my_plazes_city').innerHTML = 'doing that in ' + obj.plazes.city;

document.getElementById('my_plazes_name').innerHTML = ' at ' + obj.plazes.name + '';
} else {
document.getElementById('my_plazes_city').innerHTML = 'offline';
}
}

<script src="http://area51.linsin.de/plazes.php?callback=plazes" type="text/javascript"></script>

I've already implemented the php script to call the current plazes API, but as mentioned before I'm still waiting for response of the support.