A New Macbook - Thank You!

A couple of weeks ago I posted via Twitter that my Macbook had died. I’ve had logic board issues with it for quite a while. A few people had suggested that I post a donation page for tweekly.fm so that users who enjoyed the service could provide something in return. Between a combination of the donation page and lowering the premium user price I was able to generate a good sum of money towards a new Macbook.

In donations, over £500 came in and with a large uptake of discounted premium memberships I was able to raise half of the money needed to purchase a new Macbook.
Two weeks ago I took on a new client and earned the rest of the amount that was needed.

I’m happy to report that I’ve now got a new Macbook Pro and its a lot, lot better than my previous machine. I’ve posted a few photos to flickr taken a few days after it arrived (it was put straight to work when it came!).

I’d like to extend a huge thank you to every person who donated or purchased a membership during the two weeks when the campaign ran - you helped me out an awful lot and ensured that the future of tweekly.fm remains bright!

(Source: help.tweekly.fm)

Helping Tweekly.fm

Hello Tweekly.fm Users!

The response to my request has been amazing. I’ve also been working for a new client this week to raise more funds towards my new machine. I can tell you that I’m halfway there now and hopefully will be back working on tweekly.fm by the end of May.

Thank you to all the wonderful people who have helped so far and to all those who have written such kind words - they’re very much appreciated.

(Source: help.tweekly.fm)

No Updates/Previews until Last.fm is Up

Just to remind you folks, no updates will be processed because we can’t pull user data from Last.fm at present. Keep an eye on http://status.last.fm/ for more information. As soon as web services are back up, we’ll be able to process users and catch up.

Go Premium, Get More!

As you’ve probably read or seen when you’ve logged in to the site, premium memberships has launched. Initially the upgraded membership will give you:

• No advertisements while logged in to the site
• Priority queue (your update gets out quicker and doesn’t depend on its position in the queue)
• 10 Top artists displayed on your profile page instead of 3. (We’ll be allowing you to select how many we show here, plus post in an update shortly).
• Contribute artist reviews that will be used on artist pages instead of the default data.
• Priority support via email, skype or msn
• Helping fund the development of the site but getting something useful for your money.

Incidentally it seems most people like the fact that its helping the development out. Thanks pretty cool. Head over to the site today to upgrade your account.

Tweekly.fm Premium Now Live

The first stage of premium accounts is now live. The basic set of features that I’ll be launching it with can be found at http://www.tweekly.fm/premium/go, as always if you have any questions then feel free to submit them via the contact form.

Tweekly.fm Premium

This is a cross post from http://dor.ky/entry/tweeklyfm-premium.

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In the coming weeks I’ll be pushing out more features to the site. This involves adding a new level of service to the site and changing the way that some features work to accommodate this. In short, I’ll be adding a premium level services which will comprise of the following features:

Premium Benefits

• Extended Profile Data (Up to 10 Artists & Top Tracks)
• Choose to Publish Top Artists or Top Tracks
• Customise update output, such as counts, names and hashtags
• Sync your Twitter/Facebook friends with Last.fm (only users that use tweekly.fm at present)
• Administrate comments on your profile
• Contribute reviews of your favourite bands for our new weekly recommendation blog
• If an update fails for whatever reason, we’ll email to let you know why
• Knowing that you’re helping the service continue and survive

Changes to Standard/Free Accounts

• Comments on your profile will become read-only (inappropriate flagging will be possible)
• Removal of hashtags from outgoing updates
• No email alerts

The cost of a premium upgrade is still being decided. At present, I’m looking at around $16 USD/year. I’ll also be adding multiple languages soon too so that you may use the site in your native language.

Moving to MongoDB

This was posted originally on my blog, if you wish to leave feedback then please do so there.

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Over the past two days I’ve been making a lot of changes to how tweekly.fm operates and functions for both users and myself. We no longer user MySQL for the majority of the site because concurrently, it just couldn’t handle what we were throwing at it very well. By moving over to a NoSQL alternative (in our case, MongoDB) we can now support a lot more users concurrently and processing over 35,000 updates on a Sunday no longer brings the service down the a slugs pace.

One of the main problems that I had was debugging when users had problems with the service. During the move over to MongoDB I’ve added a whole host of logging integration points to detect when an interaction succeeds or fails. It will now be logged to our logging store and the most recent log response will be stored in your user record and visible on your settings page. This will help identify when something does go wrong, where and why it does.

I can’t stress how important it is that you confirm your Last.fm account too. When you go through this authorisation process I get a token back to access your play data on Last.fm which I can then user to pull your data even when your account is protected. Its also a lot more failsafe than just having a legacy Last.fm username set - although for the past two months its been mandatory. There was also a slight bug that happened with a subset of protected accounts which has now been fixed too. I’m quite confident that your play data will be pulled correctly every single time. You can manually update your accounts play data by visiting the ‘Publish Now’. You don’t need to actually push an update out, just visiting the page will update your account.

The next change affects your personal tweekly.fm URL. Twitter users will now be found at http://www.tweekly.fm/twitter/dordotky and Facebook users will get their own URL at http://www.tweekly.fm/facebook/501640297 which functions in the exact same way that the original tweekly.fm user pages. Facebook users will also get a short bit.ly URL. Comments will return to these pages shortly.

The Facebook issue of cutting off updates has also been fixed with a new version of the processing engine that builds updates for users. You shouldn’t see an errors like that again. Shared play counts, artist data and comments will return within a few days. If you notice any problems or something doesn’t work as expected then please do let me know.

Tweekly.fm Orkut Community

I’ve added an Orkut community for tweekly.fm users. Feel free to ask questions and request support there.

Scott (@dotdorky)

Facebook Support is Now Live

Just a quick note to let you all know that Facebook support is now completely live throughout the site. If you would like to post updates to Facebook, simply sign in with your Facebook account and grant the application permission to function. You can sign in with Twitter or Facebook and it’ll publish to their respective networks.

You’re free to use both applications. I’ll be adding a profile tab option shortly for the people who want to have that feature of the old Facebook application too.

A last note, if you love the service, consider making a donation to support the development. You can make a donation here at http://www.tweekly.fm/donate :)