Tweekly.fm Blog

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Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:14:16 +0000

A New Macbook - Thank You!

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 20:21:17 +0100

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!

Helping Tweekly.fm

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 18:53:07 +0100

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.

No Updates/Previews until Last.fm is Up

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 16:04:23 +0000

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!

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:29:32 +0000

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

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 20:11:42 +0000

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

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 01:35:59 +0000

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

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

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 11:00:00 +0100

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

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

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 20:34:30 +0100

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

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 22:44:30 +0100

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 :)

IRC Channel (Updated)

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:53:00 +0100

For those who use IRC, feel free to pop along to irc.last.fm, channel #tweeklyfm and say hello. You are also welcome to ask support questions here too.

Referrals!

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:59:17 +0100

If you sign in to your account on Tweekly.fm and go to your settings page you’ll notice two new items have appeared. These are ‘Referred By’ and ‘Referrer URL’. The ‘Referred By’ field will most likely be empty as this feature has only just been introduced. The ‘Referrer URL’ field is a special link you can share with friends, when recommending they sign up for the service. This will allow us to track who has been the most active in helping to spread the word about the site and helping us gain new users.

Word on the street is that at the end of August there will be a prize for who manages to find us the most new users. Could it be you?

New news, Queued Updates & More

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:28:00 +0100

I’ve removed the old news section from the welcome page. Its been replaced by a syndicated news source from our shiny tumblr blog. This will provide a better service to our end users and they will always see the latest news instead of stale news.

A major feature launch this week was the revival of the old ‘Publish Now’ feature although it works in a completely different way. All of our outgoing updates are now processed via a queuing system. By using a queue we’re able to limit the number of updates we’re pushing out in a better manner and for services like Twitter who have been having capacity issues, we can lower our output to help accommodate service issues.

Updates are pushed through the queue within two minutes on average. At peak times this may be slightly longer but its still a reasonable amount of time. We push thousands of updates out per day and trying to please everyone can be a difficult task - but we try our best to do so. The weekly updates are still pushed out using an older mechanism, and are not affected by the queue status.

Another major step for Tweekly this week has been that we will hit 40,000 users this afternoon, I’m expecting it to be around 5pm. I’ll post an update later with the lucky user who is our 40,000th.

Last but not least, we provide our services for free to end users. Using an ad-based model hasn’t worked too brilliant for helping to fund the service (even though there were some very kind people who have donated in the past to help us). Also, the development of the service is not funded or paid for, so it comes out of personal time. If you have any spare money that you would like to donate, then please do so at http://www.tweekly.fm/donate and help keep us going.

Scott. (@dordotky)

'Publish Now' is Live!

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:23:20 +0100

The highly popular feature from the old version of tweekly.fm was the ‘Publish Now’ feature that would allow you to post an update any time you wished. This feature has been pushed live this morning. You’ll find it on the right side menu after signing in.

New Design, New Features

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:59:47 +0100

As you can see, we have a new design and if you’re taken a look around you’ll notice that things look a lot different feature wise too. We are aiming to expand the capabilities of the system to better serve our 37,000+ users. We’re taking on lots of new users each day and slowly but surely ironing out the little bugs that eek their way into our service.

A change in how Last.fm accounts are handled has been implemented now and this affects all users. Every user of the service will now be required to confirm their Last.fm account by signing in via the Last.fm site which will then provide us with an access token for fetching your user data. This also means that we can now support protected users for Last.fm which has been a requested feature for a long time.

We’re currently looking at implementing more features to allow you to find both new music and new friends via our service. As part of providing a better service, there is now a separate contact page that can be used for any queries or questions and we aim to reply as fast as we possibly can do. There is the new Help Centre which will provide answers to common problems.

We’re also looking to be a little more transparent with our data too, we’re going to begin placing statistics on the site showing our most popular artists, users and tracks. Another feature soon to come will be a setting on your user account for your time zone which will allow you to choose a time frame for your weekly update to be posted in. We’ve found that some of our users would prefer their update to be posted at say 6pm local time, vs 6pm GMT. We will be providing updates for this within the next few weeks.

Hopefully you’ll all enjoy the better service and more productive site. If you find a bug or have any problems, then please do contact us and we’ll get right on it.

Scott.

Honey, I'm Home.

Thu, 27 May 2010 16:47:22 +0100

Over the past two days we’ve been moving tweekly.fm over to a new server. This will be our permanent home for the foreseeable future. The changes that we’re slowly making to the services we provide will have a positive impact for all. We already now have better connectivity and capacity than we previously had which has resulted in the site being accessible all day long - even during the process of pushing tweets out.

We’re situated a lot closer geographically to the Twitter API so latency has dropped by nearly two thirds. Over the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out new features and a new design.

Until then, stay tuned and get excited, its going to be awesome!