Microblogging services - Plurk, Twitter, Jaiku and more

Yesterday, there were 10,000 downloads of this image from our web site, and if you click on the image, you'll get a full sized copy and see that it's 1600 x 1200 pixels and nearly a megabyte in size. So that's some 10 Gbytes of traffic! I know I'm quite well followed in some quarters, but this is ridiculous!.

A quick analysis of my log files, and I see that the picture is being called up from URLs such as http://www.plurk.com/song4u, and the IP addresses seem to point mostly to Taiwan ... it looks like my buffet lunch picture is hotlinked from someone's "Plurk" account, and my image has been used in their plurking. Does this sound a bit like Twitter and Tweets? Am I *really* out of date and I should have moved on from Twitter to Plurk ... perhaps to Jaiku ([link]) which is the Google offering, I understand ... or to Identi.ca, Qaiku or Brightkite? I found a comparison on Twitter v Plurk [here], which actually says that they're both microblogging services but not really comparable, and I then found a Wikipedia page which compares them(!!) and various others, [here].

I'm "on" Twitter - my automatic feed is [here] but is seems to be patchy in how it performs (must look at that - the intermittent bugs are always the worst!). More importantly, I'm [here] on LinkedIn ... and I'm blogging daily and on various forums too. So I'm going to skip over the other "microblogging" sites for the moment - there just aren't enough hours in the day.

So what am I going to do about all those hits that I'm getting from Taiwan? And what are they costing me? We're very fortunate that we have plenty of bandwidth on our hosting; unchecked for the month, it could perhaps have been an expensive issue, but I've chosen to move the picture to a new URL and replace it with the one seen on the right of this paragraph - down from 1 Mbyte a go to 10k per go. There's little point in me putting up too much of a sales message (I've nothing to sell to Taiwan), and if I started slinging mud or putting up adult images, some of the mud could come back and stick on me.

OK .. Tweet Feed solved. I changed my Twitter password but had left my script unaltered. Duhhhh! I've written before - [here] - about automating a Twitter feed. I haven't shown you the error message that you get when you use the wrong password in the script - it's:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<hash>

  <request>/statuses/update.xml</request>

  <error>Could not authenticate you.</error>

</hash>

I HAVE written, before, about the need to check return statuses in production code, and I commend this problem as a good example of why you should do so!

(written 2010-01-05) 29e1

Associated topics are indexed under

G905 - Well House Consultants - Blogging and Blog Administration
  [4000] 9 years, and 4000 articles on - (2013-02-09)
  [3759] The five oldest blogs and the horses mouth - (2012-06-09)
  [3514] Microblogging - what I should have tweeted in the last 48 hours - (2011-11-10)
  [3208] Links for social media, microblogs and business networking - (2011-03-20)
  [3186] How to add a customised twitter feed to your site - (2011-02-27)
  [3163] Twitter - the special use of @ # and http: in tweets - (2011-02-09)
  [3016] The legal considerations of your web presence - revisited - (2010-10-26)
  [2823] Where have all the bloggers gone? - (2010-06-24)
  [2751] Going off at a tangent, for a ramble - (2010-05-04)
  [2517] Blogging accuracy - open invitation for any corrections - (2009-11-29)
  [2449] Four aspects - Chamber, Transport, Courses and Hotel - (2009-10-11)
  [2192] Copy writing - allowing for the cut - (2009-05-21)
  [2000] 2000th article - Remember the background and basics - (2009-01-18)
  [1978] From spam to mod_alias - finding resources - (2009-01-05)
  [1203] A Fresh horse - (2007-05-24)
  [1077] In answer to 'am I glad I started a blog' ... - (2007-02-12)
  [1000] One Thousand Posts and still going strong - (2006-12-18)
  [876] Making pages clearer - easy Disability Discrimination Act Compliance - (2006-09-23)
  [671] Both ends of the animal - (2006-04-05)
  [508] Comment, please! - (2005-11-28)
  [425] Caching an XML feed - (2005-08-26)
  [410] Reading a news or blog feed (RSS) in your PHP page - (2005-08-12)
  [405] Horse's Mouth is a year old - (2005-08-07)
  [390] Moderating wiki, blog, and forum contributions - (2005-07-26)
  [359] Chicken soup without the religion - (2005-06-26)
  [245] I'm not blogging it - (2005-03-14)
  [231] Feedback as lifeblood - (2005-02-28)
  [204] The confidence to allow public comments - (2005-02-06)
  [185] Who am I? - (2005-01-21)
  [177] Blogs come of age - (2005-01-14)
  [145] A comment on comments - (2004-12-09)
  [141] Too technical? - (2004-12-05)
  [18] Wanted: More hours in the day - (2004-08-18)
  [6] Blog v Forum - (2004-08-07)
  [1] First Jottings - (2004-08-05)

G209 - Well House Consultants - Keeping up to date
  [3755] Cruising on the Mersey Ferry? - (2012-06-07)
  [3653] What is happening in 59 days time in Melksham? - (2012-03-14)
  [3469] Teaching dilemma - old tricks and techniques, or recent enhancements? - (2011-10-08)
  [3003] What will we be teaching in six years? - (2010-10-17)
  [2940] Training course locations - Melksham, UK; Buxton, UK; Lake Constance, Germany; Venice Italy, the USA and India - (2010-08-30)
  [2352] Printed Directories - the start of the updating season - (2009-08-12)
  [2078] A lot has changed - but the memory lingers on - (2009-03-12)
  [2032] Mobile Internet - an alternative to hotel WiFi - (2009-02-09)
  [1488] New trainee laptop fleet for our Open Source courses - (2007-12-30)
  [396] The next technologies - (2005-07-29)
  [250] We dont stand still - (2005-03-18)
  [160] Review of the Autumn - (2004-12-22)
  [143] Network Camera - (2004-12-07)
  [86] Talk review - Idiomatic Perl, David Cross - (2004-10-12)
  [83] Geek Cruising - (2004-10-11)
  [82] Keeping up to date - (2004-10-10)

G503 - Well House Consultants - Newsletter and publicity
  [3984] 20 minutes in to our 15 minutes of fame - (2013-01-20)
  [3974] TV show appearance - how does it effect your web site? - (2013-01-13)
  [3354] Sales and Marketing - adding advertising to the product - (2011-07-11)
  [3165] Journalism 101 - (2011-02-11)
  [3153] Points West to Belfast - (2011-02-01)
  [2873] Another toot of the trumpet - (2010-07-16)
  [2388] `Of Course` is back! - (2009-08-31)
  [2244] What should a web site cost you? - (2009-06-16)
  [2124] Building down expectations - (2009-04-09)
  [2051] A Presentation about our company - web and PHP - (2009-02-23)
  [1698] Dealing with The Press - (2008-07-06)
  [1673] Spam Filters ... are working! - (2008-06-11)
  [1494] A time to update pictures - (2008-01-03)
  [1284] An update on the West Wilts show ... - (2007-07-30)
  [1090] Too many instructions, too much detail - (2007-02-23)
  [1087] Telling a story in different ways - (2007-02-20)
  [904] Of course I'll tell you by email - (2006-10-25)
  [734] Keeping customers informed by email - (2006-05-26)
  [480] New look to website - (2005-10-30)
  [458] Final courses of '05 coming up .... - (2005-10-08)
  [336] Targetted Advertising - (2005-06-05)
  [281] What they are saying about our OF COURSE newsletter - (2005-04-16)
  [57] Posting 1000 letters! - (2004-09-21)
  [48] PHP - onwards and upwards - (2004-09-14)

518b

Back to
Efficient debugging of regular expressions

Previous and next
or
Horse's mouth home

Forward to
Bright day, snowy day

Some other Articles

Forums for your Melksham and open source discussions
Extra MySQL course dates (2 day course, UK)
Excellent staff make for excellent hotel
Bright day, snowy day
Microblogging services - Plurk, Twitter, Jaiku and more
Efficient debugging of regular expressions
Tuning the web site for sailing on through this year
The future of MySQL
Training comparison to QA Training, Learning Tree, GB Direct.
Moving the product forward - ours, and MySQL, Perl, PHP and Python too

4086 posts, page by page

Link to page ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82 at 50 posts per page

This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

Link to Ezine home page (for reading).
Link to Blogging home page (to add comments).

You can Add a comment or ranking to this page

Public Training Courses

Running regularly at our UK training Centre.
[Schedule] - [About] - [Book]

Like this? ??