Twitter downtime, MessageDance helps
I saw this notice on my Twitter home page last night.
I can understand how Twitter must be dealing with their ever growing pool of users. It can be extremely challenging to manage infrastructure to support to such a huge capacity.
Going back to the important point; In such situations when active Twitter users who update their status often , what happens to their status when Twitter is going thru downtime?. Not sure how Twitter users handled it so far, but now they have MessageDance. You can send messages to your Twitter without having to worry about their downtime and MessageDance will deliver it to Twitter when it is backup.
It is very simple, log in, Go to social profile tab and setup your Twitter profile and thats it. Now you can send messages(either by sending email directly from your mail client or within MessageDance) and your messages will reach Twitter (depending on which option you selected in social profile). Detail of configuration is documented here
Now you can send hassel free messages to MessageDance , which will reach your Twitter instantly if it is up or whenever it comes back up. As an added bonus your messages goes to Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, LiVEJOURNAL , Blogger, Wordpress , your personal blog if you have confirgured them accordingly.
MessageDance Twitter’ng now
This long awaiting feature of MessageDance is out. Yes!. MessageDance talks Twitter now :-). We have integrated with Twitter, adding to our existing list of Social media sites and more.
Twitter status update from MessageDance opens up the whole new world for active Twitter users. Details is on MessageDance Blog. In short users can do content rich twittering (video/images/any other forms) that any email can accommodate. Yes that brings up another important point. With this feature users can send status updates from their email itself. Users can do bunch of other things as well. All the options are listed on Sam’s Message.
Let me sum it up. With MessageDance-Twitter combo, You can
- Send twitter status updates right from your email
- Send just more than 140 characters, the details follows on MessageDance site
- Decide to send email subject or body to twitter (more options…it keeps coming
- If you do not want to send all messages from MessageDance to Twitter, you can directly send message to twitter by sending an email to tweet@messagedance.com or do the same within MessageDance dance floor. (We honor user’s wish to message specific twittering)
- Your messages are flagged with twitter icon in your MessageDance widget
- Tweet awareness in your MessageDance message detail (@username feature of Twitter for direct linking Twitter user on the status update)
More Twitter possiblities with MessageDance…
Make paginating_find work with Rails 1.1.6
For some reason I like to work with older versions Rails :). This paginating_find plugin is written to use newer version of Rails’s alias method chaning, which will not work with Rails 1.1.6. If you install paginating_find in your vendors folder and start your server you will get error something like this
../vendor/plugins/paginating_find/lib/paginating_find.rb:11:in `included’: undefined method `alias_method_chain’ for #<Class:ActiveRecord::Base> (NoMethodError)
from /Users/railsapp/config/../vendor/plugins/paginating_find/lib/paginating_find.rb:8:in `class_eval’
from /Users/railsapp/config/../vendor/plugins/paginating_find/lib/paginating_find.rb:8:in `included’
from /Users/railsapp/config/../vendor/plugins/paginating_find/init.rb:1:in `include’
So here it is My tweak to make paginating_find plugin work with Rails 1.1.6 (This assumes you have followed the plugin install steps from Alex’s blog ).
Just replace alias_method_chain line in paginating_find.rb file with following
self.send :alias_method, :find_without_pagination, :find
self.send :alias_method, :find, :find_with_pagination
This technique works with any alias_method_chain backward compatibility to older version of Rails. I have posted similar post for attachment_fu make it work with Rails 1.1.6 here
Hope that helps.