The day has come. Twitterscribe is opening itself wide and letting you all come in (though we're still in beta). Hooray! Let us feast on lambs and sloths and orangutans!
What I've been up to
It's been a learning experience. With a small team of beta users, I've been forging bravely into the depths of the unknown, solving new and difficult problems in clever and interesting ways, but above all emerging triumphant.
Well, not really. There wasn't a lot to do really, nor a lot required of the beta boys and girls, as I just wanted to get an idea of the scale of the data.
Once I had a few users I started to rebuild the site more sensibly and add in scope for more functionality in the user area. Version one of the site was extremely limited and only let you export all tweets to CSV, so I needed to rectify this — but I had to build in the capacity to do new stuff first.
So over the last few months I've redesigned the user area, added in some more sensible functionality here and there, and finally added the ability to generate PDFs of your tweets.
The main thing now is to see how the site scales. With 58 users, the database currently stands at 147,600 tweets, and is around 25 meg. Obviously it's possible we're going to get completely overwhelmed with even smallish numbers of users, so I'm really holding my breath on this one. I'm no DBA so success may very well cause more troubles than joy.
So what's new?
Here are some things I've fixed since the last blog post:
- Blog wait, what? Oh crap, I forgot to do this one. How embarrassing.
- Fixed dates so users not in GMT have sensible dates on their tweets.
- Favourites you can now backup your favourites nightly, and export them in CSV or PDF in addition to your tweets
- Rejigged interface for more prettiness and functionality
- Manual imports so that once you sign up, you can add your tweets from as far back as Twitter will let you
- Close my account so that if you break up with me, you don't need to tell me to my face — you can write it in a letter, babe (figuratively), and I won't have to know.
- PDFs! Yes indeed, PDFs straight to your downloads folder. Now in two exciting flavours, classic and modern. Okay so they're just different fonts
And after that
Everything that I've mentioned in the previous post but not completed is still up for grabs. I think I owe it to you guys to get oAuth happening so I don't need your password, but after that anything could happen. Hoewever, I'm currently very close to having books ready to go so I imagine it won't take long before that rears its lovely, custom printed, hard-covered head.
By the way, if you want an idea of what a book of your tweets might look like, check out this excellent post.
Stop it, I'm blushing
I really hope you like the service. Tell all your friends. Tell your mum. Think of how awesome your own book could be.
And please, go easy on me. Like Mr Twitpic, this is a one-man service and bugs, outages and facepalming will be inevitable.