Twitter notifications - anybody want a go?

[swaldman]

So I've been working on Bug 4504 for some time, on and off. It adds the ability to have DW tweet about your new entries. It's nearly ready, and I wouldn't mind some alpha-testing to see if people can find interesting ways to break it.

If you want to have a go,

• Create an account on http://www.swaldman.hack.dreamwidth.net/ (I'll leave it live here until further notice, which will be at least a few days)
• On the Other Sites settings page there will be a new link "Add New Twitter Account". Do that.
• Then it should work just like crossposting, except that only the subject of the entry is of interest.
• Let me know (here is good) if you break it in an interesting way, or indeed if you have other comments. Reports of "All works fine for me" are also very welcome, although of course not as useful as bug reports.

Bear in mind that you are theoretically giving me the ability to read and to post to any twitter account that you associate in this way. I'm not going to do anything with it, but it is remotely possible that bugs in my code might - this has not had any code review yet - so you might want to use a non-important account. Please remember to revoke access from https://twitter.com/settings/applications when you've finished playing with this.

A particular maybe-prone-to-oddity area that could use testing is anything involving unicode and >1-byte characters, as they relate to the length of tweets. Twitter should allow 140 characters, not 140 bytes, and hopefully my code should count things correctly to truncate long text in the right place.

Thanks, and have fun :-)

EDIT: At the moment, while tweeting from my Dreamhack seems to work, signing up for new accounts doesn't. I shall investigate and update here, probably around midday GMT on 31st Jan.

Update 31/01: It wasn't me! New account creation doesn't work on the current develop branch. I'll make another post here when it's actually possible for people to test!

Update: fu fixed the problem. It should work now :-)

Comments

[delladea]

I tried to create an account on your hack, but I keep getting the following error messages:

Errors in form:
    You must enter an account name.
    Your email address cannot be blank.
    You must enter a password.
    You must enter a valid birthdate.
    You must agree to the Terms of Service.

I've tried different variations of username/email/password and it doesn't seem to matter.

[swaldman]

Aww, crap. Thanks for pointing this out.

I'll investigate tomorrow, but the probable cause:

Dreamwidth currently uses version 1.0 of the JSON perl module. This dates from somewhere around 2005. The Twitter library that I've been using requires a 2.x version of the JSON module, but later versions are not fully backward-compatible (which is why DW hasn't updated yet). For Twitter interaction to work, my 'hack has to use the more recent version. I had expected that to break fancy JS stuff... but it looks as though it broke signup.

I'll have a look tomorrow to check whether this is the problem and see whether there's an easy bodge. Otherwise, we'll just have to wait until the site is using the newer module (which is needed anyway before this feature can go live).

[swaldman]

Update: It wasn't JSON that broke this. It was simply that in the current development build, account creation does not work! This perversely pleases me - boo, Dreamwidth is broken, but wheeee, it's not my fault ;-)

So no testing until we get this fixed; I'll post again when it works again.

[denise]

LOL. Good thing we found it out before the code push ;)

[swaldman]

Hee. That was almost exactly fu's response as well :-)

[swaldman]

And, now signup is working again. Please feel free to give it a go :-)