The other day I was continuing my long-term quest to sort through all the flotsam and jetsam of accumulated crap on my hard drive when I came across the following video (click through if you don’t see the video below). Recorded in April 2009, it shows the first version of the TweetMeme Live functionality without any rate or minimum retweet restrictions. As you can see it moved pretty quickly.

Bear in mind that these are unique URLs, not simply repeats of URLs already seen. Between seeing a URL in a tweet and it appearing on this page the system has followed any redirects, grabbed and parsed the contents of the page and stuffed it into a database, and it does it all in near-realtime. Pretty impressive stuff if you ask me.

The live functionality on TweetMeme.com has now been removed, but it was great fun to develop and demonstrated the rate at which the site discovered and processed new URLs back in April 2009; you can bet the rate is far higher now given the explosion in the popularity of Twitter since then.

The implementation used long-polling requests connected to an nginx module which internally checked a queue for new items. While it didn’t get a huge number of concurrent viewers during the time it was up on the site it scaled incredibly well for such a simple solution.

It’s a shame that it’s not available on the site anymore; it would be interesting to see how much the rate has increased in the past ten months.

I’ve put a post up on my personal blog detailing my goals for 2010 and this post will expand on some of the ideas I’ve had for the work goal.

The core of the goal is to create more freedom. Freedom to do what I want to do. Freedom to work when and how I want to. Freedom to experiment with new ways of earning a living.

Teaching

When I wonder what I’m passionate about I see a common thread… I love to teach people. Whether it’s teaching a class of kids, training a group of adults, mentoring an employee or answering questions in mailing lists, I love to share my knowledge and experience. I love seeing the “I get it!” moments and generally watching people develop new skills.

I have a couple of ideas when it comes to exploring this passion. I’m going to create a set of screencasts on at least one topic, possibly two. I haven’t decided what model to use for revenue yet, if any, but the first few episodes will definitely be free forever.

I want to look at what else I can do in this area because it’s a very important part of my personality and I know I have a lot to give.

Photography

I love photography, and this year I want to develop this passion and my existing skills. I have recently had my first exposure of on-location portrait photography and I found it extremely fulfilling. I want to do more of it.

I want to start building a stock portfolio. Over the years I’ve taken some excellent stock shots, but I’m yet to have one accepted by iStockphoto. The reasons given have been varied, but tend to be around the areas of resolution (old camera), sharpness (interpolation didn’t fool them) and subjects. I think I have a great eye for this type of shot but I’ve never taken photos specifically for that purpose. That will change this year.

Travel

Generally speaking I hate taking holidays, but I’ve realised that this is due to my attitude to the word. Travel is something else entirely. I really enjoy exploring new places. When combined with photography it’s completely different, so I want to do a lot more of it this year.

I haven’t worked out any details yet but I’m planning a number of trips both within the UK and beyond. Some will be day trips, others will be weekends and a couple will be longer, but the idea is to get out there and see the world, little by little .

As soon as I post the form to get my passport renewed……….

Consulting

I really love internet-based technologies. Design, development, languages, architecture, tools, strategies, SEO… everything about the internet excites me… except coding. These days I’m finding that spending my hours coding away, writing the same stuff I’ve always written is leaving me excessively deflated. Except when I have an interesting problem to solve.

There’s nothing I like more than when a new and interesting problem comes along that needs solving. I will happily spend 48 hours straight designing and coding a solution, because it has grabbed my attention. If coding’s what I’m going to be doing then that’s the sort of coding I need to find. If not then I want to be architecting solutions.

In an ideal world I would be consulting for a number of startup companies, bringing my broad range of expertise and experience to the table without the burden of a full-time employee. If you’d like to talk about how I can help you check out my LinkedIn profile and/or contact me.

And more…

That doesn’t cover everything I have planned but it’s the key points and all I’m willing to reveal publicly . I’m very excited about the next twelve months and the opportunities and experiences they’ll bring. If you want to be a part of it, let me know.

I had a request recently to release some of the code from the TwitApps bots. The core of both bots is actually a shared email handler and I have no problem sharing it with the world.

Twitter-related stuff » Handling email notifications

On the assumption that I’ll eventually get around to sharing some more Twitter-related stuff I’ve created a new section in the projects area of this site. If there’s anything related to Twitter integration that you’d like to see me cover there please let me know and I’ll be happy to help.

My latest project went live on Monday this week. It’s another Twitter-based toy along the same lines as hotornot but it uses your Twitter account and profile picture. Since launch it’s proved very successful and has spread quickly due to its viral nature.

The site is called Twitorfit and was the brainchild of a Twitter-based conversation between Nick Halstead of fav.or.it and Andy McLoughlin and Zuzanna Pasierbinska from Huddle. You can read the full story on the Twitorfit blog.

Rate users then see the top 10 “twits” and “fits”

Development of the site took a little under 20 man-hours in total from concept to launch including several rewrites of the core architecture. I’d like to thank Daniel Saxil-Nielsen, the designer at fav.or.it, for sorting out the design and Alex Forrow, their sysadmin, for sorting out the live server. They both responded to my requests quickly and efficiently leaving me able to concentrate on getting the code done.

I’m hoping to do another post with a bit more detail about how Twitorfit works, and the specific techniques I used to ensure it would stand up to the initial peak in traffic that this type of project tends to get. For now I’ll just say that it’s written in PHP5, uses a MySQL database and Memcache. It’s running on Sun hardware provided by the Startup Essentials program.

The site currently asks for your Twitter username and password when you log in and/or register which is less than ideal, but until they release their much-awaited OAuth implementation it’s the most user-friendly way to authenticate Twitter users. It does not store your password and aside from login verification and the optional tweet when you register it does not make any requests against the Twitter API as you.

In summary it’s been a fun little project to work on, and the feedback so far has been fantastic. If you’re not on Twitter yet you should be – get your account here, and when you’re done be sure to register on Twitorfit and get rating!

I finally got around to updating the 3ft9 website with the new logo and some info on the projects we’ve done or been involved in. Let me know what you think in the comments.

I was a bit bored the other day but managed to find something to do. Something reminded me of a guy I used to work with who used the phrase “It’s all gone tits up” a lot. He headed up the test team so he had reason to use it!

I don’t really know why but I decided to log in to my Gandi account and checked the availability of titsup.*, found that titsup.net was available and registered it.

The result of all this is that I’ve developed a simple website to check if a given URL is working. There are other sites that do this, mainly in response to Twitter downtime, but in an effort to differentiate TitsUp from those it has two features I couldn’t find anywhere else.

It can check a domain name like the others, but you can also enter a complete URL and it will check that. It follows all redirects until it reaches a destination and it also lets you know exactly what went wrong rather than just saying whether it’s working or not.

The other feature is only evident if the URL you check is not working. TitsUp will offer to check a failing URL every 10 minutes for the next 24 hours. If it starts working you’ll get an email telling you the good news. If it’s still not working after 24 hours you’ll get an email saying so. It can also optionally notify you in both cases via a direct message in Twitter thereby allowing you to get an SMS notification as well as an email. Note that for this to work you’ll need to follow the titsup user.

As a simple tool I think it works really well. I’m interested in any opinions people might have so please let me know what you think. Now all I need to do is create an icon for the site and Twitter user. Anyone fancy giving that a go?

My blog entries are like buses, you wait weeks for one and two arrive at once.

My latest pet project is GRankT. GRankT is a simple website that will track the position of a URL within the top 50 search results on Google for any given search query. It’s free and hopefully simple to use.

See http://grankt.sharedserver.net/ for more information.

The core functionality is there now, that being the basic website and the daily rank updates. To come is historic displays, almost certainly in some whizzy graphy-type form. Stay tuned.