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So, apparently around November 5th we stopped posting to Twitter. We didn't find out until around the end of that month and when we did nobody had the time and/or ability to look into why until this past week.
Now how we get our headlines over to Twitter is overly complicated and, frankly, idiotic. It's done by one of our IRC bots pulling headlines from the RSS feed and posting them on Twitter as @SoylentNews. The bot was written back in 2014 with hand-rolled (as opposed to installed via package manager) Python libraries and hasn't been updated since. This was breakage that should absolutely have been expected to happen. Twitter's penchant for arbitrarily changing their unversioned API means you either keep on top of changes or expect things to break for no apparent reason.
Here's the question: do we even care? We can either find someone who's willing to rewrite the bot to a new Twitter library, do it the sane way as either a cron or slashd job, or just say to hell with it since we only have two hundred or so followers on Twitter anyway. What say you, folks?
[TMB Note]: Twitter's who-to-follow algorithms really impressed me this morning when I logged in to manually post this story. How did they know we were all huge @JustinBieber and @BarackObama fans?
[Update]: We're again annoying Twitter users by spreading relative intelligence across their platform of choice. Credit goes to Crash for wisely pointing out that we don't have to code everything ourselves.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday December 18 2017, @01:24PM (2 children)
In a way, I am impressed that someone took the time to sit down and type all of the above, and from a registered account (not AC) no less.
I do not get my news by twitter and would be unaffected by headlines via twitter either way. I looked into auto-tweeting for one of my web sites a few years ago and it looked like more trouble than it was worth.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 18 2017, @01:38PM
The coding itself isn't that big of a deal if you're already maintaining something like Rehash but the non-versioned API and breaking changes to said API mean you either keep up with every little change to it or expect your code to break without warning. Stripe (my personally preferred SN CC processor to code for) does their API infinitely better. It's versioned, so additions and changes do not break everyone's code whenever $new_programmer decides $old_way sucks and everything should be done $new_way.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @09:24PM
Sometimes a rage-boner is all that gets you out of bed in the morning