TwitterMail is history...Well take it from here...

After working out some bugs, we've got the Tweets going again from our server - WITHOUT the use of "TwitterMail".

TM was becoming such a pain in the a**. The guy just DOESN'T seem too concerned at all about what happens with his system, and he's not up on keeping people updated with the latest, so everyone would always find Tweets going through TM would just STOP...for DAYS at a time...with NO explanation. Then they'd just start right back up again. And all last night, we discovered that apparently TM was queing bulletins being sent and holding them for later. Only when later came, they BOMBED us with dupes of one particular Zone Forecast Bulletin that lasted from 7:52pm last night until about 5am this morning. That was the last straw.

So with the new means of tweet distribution having been worked out, I have REMOVED TwitterMail from the equation entirely, and we are now sending tweets to Twitter completely of our own. We no longer have the advantage of TM's HTML buffering of our bulletins, which made long bulletins prettier to view, but we can still get them out in multiple 140-character "packets". I would rather deal with this than with TM's LONG-long downtimes and tweet bombings, and reading the owner's stupid comments on his contact page.

The Local Storm Reports were a nice convenience which viewed well with TwitterMail; but unfortunately they don't format well under Twitter's API interface, so I'm going to stop sending those. If anyone REALLY wants them, I can send them to your email.

At any rate, looks like we've solved the problem with TwitterMail.

Barring Twitter itself going down, we look forward to much less downtimes or problems, now.

Looks Promising...

Noticing some bugs. Some bulletins not making it through because the Twitter API interface completely trashes any messages over the length of 140-characters. Experimenting with some settings. But some bulletins ARE getting through.

Will continue to work on this.

TwitterMail is STILL down. Heh.

Trying something new with Twitter...

Okay, trying some new stuff on the AC-EMWIN server end. We'll see if this works better with Twitter. If so, we won't have to rely on TwitterMail anymore and the downtimes should disappear - unless twitter itself goes down, which is rarer.

RRR! Twittermail down AGAIN!

TwitterMail seems to be down yet AGAIN. This is getting to be a regular thing. I'm going to have to look into alternate means of getting EMWIN messages to Twitter so that we don't have to deal with this kind of stuff.

I have an idea in mind. Looking into it right now.

Looks like TwitterMail is just going to have to be removed from our use. They're just not dependable or reliable enough.

Will keep everybody posted on what we'll be doing to keep things going, here.

ACEMWIN Twitter Page Again Operational...

Looks like TwitterMail came back up again at about 7am Eastern Time. So things are yet again right.

Twittermail down again...

Twittermail seems to again be down, so AC-EMWIN tweets to Twitter aren't working, right now. This seems to have been going on for the past two days, now. Twiitermail occasionally does this, with no explanation as to why, and no word as to when it will recover.

New Series of Listgroups - The ACWIN Project...

ACWIN stands for the "Alachua County Weather Information Network". It is a series of listgroups designed to bring weather bulletins to Alachua and surrounding counties. It will cater not just to Alachua County, but now to other surrounding northern Florida counties as well.

The following counties are included, so far: ALACHUA, BAKER, BRADFORD, CLAY, COLUMBIA, DIXIE, DUVAL, FLAGLER, GILCHRIST, HAMILTON, LEVY, MARION, NASSAU, PUTNAM, SUWANNEE, and UNION.

Each county will have three lists, created to cater to: general weather bulletins, severe weather bulletins, and civil emergency bulletins.

Users will be allowed to subscribe to each bulletin they want individually, without being forced to take everything we offer at once.

Before, users in surrounding counties were on their own. Alachua County had a SKYWARN program, and a bulletin distribution system which catered to them; but the surrounding counties had nothing, because they were smaller and there just wasn't any interest or support. We've tried to help them out by supporting them. That is what this new suite of email lists is designed to do.

For more information about the ACWIN Project, see alachuaskywarn.org/acwin .