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Today I get to release something special: a site I've built just for myself! This is special because I have been SO busy with client work that my site had become somewhat dated. I had been wanting to swap out the software from the excellent ExpressionEngine to a custom Django back end. (I mostly build in Django these days and it bugged me that my own site wasn't built with it.) I also wanted to update the front end with a modern HTML5/CSS3 interface - believe it or not, my old site was old enough to predate jQuery (not to mention border-radius and the like) so most of the UI was pretty rusty - not at all a showcase of my current skills.

So, welcome to the new colbypalmer.com. Tight, ain't it?

The site has a responsive layout that serves a different experience for desktop, tablet, mobile (landscape) and mobile (portrait). Try resizing your browser window to see what I mean! It's packed full of the latest HTML5/CSS3 goodness, with appropriate fallbacks for older browsers. It also is running a full-featured Django blog app that I've built and plan to open-source as soon as I can package...

This morning marked the official deprecation of Twitter's basic authentication system. I had been working toward the changeover, and at about 8 am I switched iTweet.net over to OAuth-based authentication. Things went pretty smoothly, I hope. Most people seem to have been able to refresh, authenticate with Twitter, and start tweeting again right away. Even aside from the improved security, the nicest immediate benefit is the API rate limit of 350 calls per hour instead of the 150/hour available through basic authentication. This will allow me to do some fun stuff that wasn't possible before. The people who were most affected by this change were those who use iTweet because twitter.com is blocked due to a company firewall/filter or censorship. These folks are not able to sign in via OAuth, just due to the nature of what OAuth is. I'm bummed that this is the case, but don't immediately see a way around it - however I am open to ideas from any direction. For the time being I've put a basic-authentication version of iTweet up at: http://itweet.net/basic/- and you can use it at that address for the next two weeks. However, please note that Twitter is...

I've been setting up a new dedicated server at Go Daddy running Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).  I was following The Perfect Server guide at HowToForge, and it was very helpful, especially in the area of setting up email using Postfix, which is new to me. I did run into an unexpected problem with outgoing email - it wasn't going out, or anywhere for that matter!  Taking a look in /var/log/mail.log showed an error saying "No route to host".  Trying to telnet to any other domain would give me the same error.  A little Googling dug up the fact that Godaddy blocks outgoing traffic on port 25, which is used for SMTP.  However they do provide a relay server that you can use for your outgoing mail. The relay server is k2smtpout.secureserver.net.  To use it, edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and set the relayhost line to look like this:

relayhost = [k2smtpout.secureserver.net]

Then restart Postfix with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart

And that should do it!  I had a lot of trouble diagnosing the problem and then finding the solution, so I thought I would post it here to help anyone else experiencing this problem.

I'm a big fan of Google Reader.  Recently iTweet user @leavingearth requested a "Send to iTweet" feature for Google Reader, and I thought this was a fantastic idea so here it is.



In Reader, select "Reader Settings" from the Settings menu in the top right corner of the page.  Then choose the "Send To" tab, and click "Create a custom link" at the bottom of this page.  A short form will be shown - enter the following items into the fields.



Name:

iTweet

URL:

http://itweet.net/web/?share=true&t=${title}&s=${short-url}

Icon URL:

http://itweet.net/favicon.ico

My pet project iTweet.net has been a great success for me.  It gets plenty of traffic, enjoys a steadily growing community of users, and is a lot of fun to work on.  The list of things I'd like to explore with this project grows every week, and with all the new additions to the Twitter API of late - OAuth, RTs, Lists, Geolocation etc - there is much more to be done in order to keep up.



The steady increase in traffic means that we've had to spend extra time and money on iTweet's server in order to keep up with all the users.  Hosting has graciously been sponsored by The Illusion Factory, but the monthly demand keeps increasing and it's clear that something needs to change.  The growing nature of both the to-do list and the server cost has led me to think of ways in which iTweet can become self-sustaining.  This app needs to start earning its keep, peoples!  One thing that I've decided to try is the insertion of sponsored tweets by 140 Proof.





This company has a very unique system of advertising delivery, promising very targeted content in an unobtrusive format. How does that...