Comments on: Twittering

By: Nicola Escher

Nicola Escher — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 21:42:10 +0000

I’m enjoying tracking your tweets, Ordinal! I’ve been using Twitterrific (http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific/) for a couple months now, and Twitter has been temperamental with external apps, to say the least; so sometimes you might find problems may be on the Twitter end of things. Good luck!

By: qDot Bunnyhug

qDot Bunnyhug — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 19:09:45 +0000

I already jumped on the “Second Life” Twitter name ’cause I was thinking about doing this (using the PHP formatting idea you had here in the comments, it’s by far the easiest way to format data for the world), but I have like, zero time. So, if you want access to that twitter account to make a main relay for this, just email me and we’ll figure something out.

By: Jaymin Carthage

Jaymin Carthage — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 23:42:15 +0000

>using a PHP intermediary allows me to
>pass off a lot of the formatting and processing
I had to do something very similar for the Store Locator in Circut City. Their replies were much too verbose for the LSL buffer size. So I wrote an intermediary that you ping with a URL and, optionally, a prefix and suffix string to prune the reply with.

By: Erbo Evans

Erbo Evans — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 20:45:23 +0000

Quite an interesting notion, Madam! I shall certainly be following further developments in this matter with interest.

Your characterization of the use of external systems through their published means as “socially-beneficial laziness” is an apt one, certainly. I myself have always thought of the provision of such means for interaction with one’s product (be it Engine-program, Aethernet service, or what have you) as “creating leverage.” If one creates leverage and makes others aware of it, they will one day exploit this leverage, to the mutual benefit of all concerned. This “Principle of Leverage” is an important one, and designers of Enginery of all sorts should be well-advised to bear it in mind, as you have done here.

By: Ordinal Malaprop

Ordinal Malaprop — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 17:12:03 +0000

Hm, that’s a thought. On the other hand, I find that using a PHP intermediary allows me to pass off a lot of the formatting and processing, which is an absolute pain to do in LSL, onto my server. In addition, if one has many friends, their updates may go over the limit of the data that a script is allowed to receive within LSL, even if one uses the JSON format rather than XML.

By: Chance Takashi

Chance Takashi — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 17:09:55 +0000

I had a similar problem a few months ago, except that I needed to use an authentication scheme other than Basic. The response I got when I asked about adding specific headers (which can be useful for many tricksy things) was utter bewilderment.

However, I seem to recall that it was mentioned that one may be able to do Basic HTTP authentication by using the username:password@domain URL scheme, eg. http://myusername:mypassword@www.website.com/page.cgi?var=val

Now I never tried this, as it did not fit my needs at the time, so I do not vouch for its actually working. But it may be worth a try.