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I have been building my first site using the Python-based development framework Django and it is really fantastic! I am picking up some of it very fast (the concept of templates and template tags, for example) because of my experience with the PHP-based CMS ExpressionEngine, and some of it is totally foreign to me... but as I muddle through it, I can tell that I've begun to learn some very powerful tools, especially once I got Django working with the jQuery javascript library.



When working with images such as profile avatars, you need to have the Python Imaging Library installed, which also means installing the libjpeg library to compile PIL. I found a couple articles here and here but it seemed that only part of each worked for me. Last night I installed everything again on my PowerBook running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.4, so I recorded the combination that worked for me:



1. If you haven't already, you must install the Apple Development Tools (XCode).

2. Download and install the Unix software installer Fink. The binary installers for the Mac worked great, both on my Intel and PowerPC machines.

3. Open a Terminal window and...

The "tracking" feature in Twitter had become a staple of my communication. I used it to catch @colbypalmer, @itweet or @colbyworld replies, and to find out what people were saying about iTweet, my Twitter client, or my other projects. It's also a great way of monitoring your competition! It was recently disabled as a part of the Twitter downgrades, and I found that I was missing replies (checking the Replies tab for all three of my accounts is something I just can't keep up with) and feeling "out of the loop" as far as my product's relationship to its users.



Enter Tweetbeep.com: "Like Google Alerts for Twitter". This tool was created by Michael Jensen, @mdjensen on Twitter. Tweetbeep scans Twitter for terms or usernames (they use the excellent Summize for this) and emails you with your results.



It's not as real-time as the original tracking, but that's kind of a nice thing as you can opt to check for your updates hourly or daily, and you don't get a million text messages all day long. You can also add links to your search, which are gathered in real-time; Tweetbeep will even find links that have...

Twitter sent some downtime notices today via a regular friends_timeline JSON request. Even though the downtime is a bummer, this kind of error reporting is really nice, as you aren't left with that "should I keep refreshing the page?" feeling. Often Twitter crashes return full XHTML pages to API calls, like the "Too many tweets!" page with the whale that we've been seeing lately. These aren't parsed into a Twitter feed like this error message was (API rate limit notices and other errors are returned as valid JSON though). This can be worked around by looking at the HTTP code that is returned, but I wish there was some way for the app to return valid JSON error messages to API requests instead of the default XHTML crash pages. Leave comments on this blog, or let's talk on Twitter or Facebook.

Tags: twitter, downtime, maintenance, error reporting, itweet

The Surfin' Safari blog announced SquirrelFish today, a new javascript interpreter for WebKit that is 1.6 times faster than the current interpreter. This is incredible, as Safari is already a super-fast browser, but as John Gruber points out in Daring Fireball, it may mean improved JavaScript support for the iPhone. If you've read much of this blog, you already know my opinion about the whole "JavaScript on the iPhone really sucks" thing. I was recently reminded of this when translating some jQuery/JSONscripting from the Web to the iPhone. What ran as a fairly simple and speedy app on the Web became unusable on the iPhone, and I had to strip out tons of code to get even basic functions up to speed. Keep your fingers crossed that SquirrelFish makes it to the iPhone, and soon! I'm not sure if its release so close to the WWDC conference means it won't be making it to the upgraded "iPhone 2" that everyone is expecting to be announced, or if an iPhone software update will be released after the new iPhones hit the market. The sooner the better! The creators of SquirrelFish say this is just the beginning...

Twitter has decided to remove a certain call from their API that the iTweet 2 private beta relied on to create the "ticker" effect that kept it updating at nearly real-time speeds.  The rate limit for API calls also remains handicapped, cut to 30 per hour from the usual 70.  This makes using Twitter API tools extremely inconvenient, and developing them is also quite frustrating. For now I have removed the "ticker" feature and the friends timeline will refresh every 140 seconds, though this number may be adjusted slightly as I attempt to keep the page open and in use today.  (Big thanks to all my helpful beta testers for your excellent feedback on the last iTweet 2 development cycle!)  Further development on the beta will continue when the API rate limit returns to normal.  Until then, Twitter API development is a waste of time as most people seem to be ditching API apps for the non-limited Web site. This is actually a good thing for me, as I am working hard on developing some other tools for The Illusion Factorythat I will be posting more about soon. Apologies for the lack of updates recently, I've been...