Cumulus Support

odd problem, the twitter feed from my Cumulus stops working after a while. Not really established any pattern to it, it just stops tweeting. Web site updates happen fine, Cumulus is fine, PC seems fine, network seems fine.

Ive noticed it a couple of times before but not bothered, this time I went through everything step by step including a reboot, made no difference. So my feeling is it may be Twitter related (the service can be hopeless) in some way, just not sure how, yet.

Has anyone else had an similar issues? or any points worth me checking? I tried debug log but I could see nothing Tweet related in it. It could be something to do with the twitter API allowance being used perhaps?

In the grand scheme of things this is right up there with watching the grass grow, but its bugging me

I gave up on Twitter months ago -- which is a shame.

I seem to recall Twitter were rejecting all Tweets sent via the API for a while when they had an issue but then it all came back online. However since then it became too sporadic for me and you can not rely on regular tweeting (and I did not want it to reflect on my service, so I gave up)

I don't think it's the API allowance, it's quite large. I think it probably is just Twitter. I've just looked at mine and I seem to have a three hour gap today.

My inclination is to agree that it is Twitter, typical Cloud app really (ie, somewhat trivial, pointless and unreliable)

steve wrote:I don't think it's the API allowance,

I'm not blaming the API allowance, more that they were not accepting traffic from any API's for a short while when their service was floored with spam

daj wrote:I'm not blaming the API allowance, more that they were not accepting traffic from any API's for a short while when their service was floored with spam

Yes, agreed. My reply was to the first message; I hadn't seen yours when I posted (I must remember to always quote!).

on and off this week Ive been trying to see what might be going wrong, including re-installing Cumulus.

It seems to me that if I use the default twitter message it does seem to work fine, but if I use a custom message by creating a twitter.txt then I get the unreliable behavior, specifically it tweets a few times then flips upside down and falls to the bottom of the cage (or stops). Various restarts, reboots, etc can prod it back into life, but its unreliable. When Cumulus is unreliably, or not at all, tweeting (with a custom message) I can tweet from the same PC using any other Tweet tool or command line (via CURL) - so my conclusion is that I think the Cumulus custom twitter message is the problem. Hardly evidence to prove guilt (but men have done life for less)

Right now 60redwood is set to tweet the standard message every 10 minutes, lets see if it runs ok for the next hour. The I'll stop it, put the custom message back and set it off again.

Update#1
Ok between 19:51 and 20:51 the standard message was tweeted every 10 minutes - Working great. Now lets swap to the custom message

This is the twitter.txt message format
#Weather #Woodley <#hour>:<#minute> <#forecast> <#temp>°C <#temptrendtext> <#rfall>mm Rain <#press>hPa <#presstrend> Humidity <#hum>% Wind <#wspeed>mph <#wdir> (<#beaufort> <#beaudesc>)

lets set it running and see... Cumulus started 20:58ish

Update#2
ok custom message has been running since 20:58 and so far hasn't tweeted at all, turning the default back on now and first tweet pops up at 22:01, I'm guessing it will now run fine again

So it could be MY custom message is the problem (likely) or it could be Cumulus as some issue with custom messages (possibly), any ideas anyone?

My custom message (twitter.txt)

Your custom message probably exceeds the Twitter limit sometimes, particularly as you have the forecast in there.

ah ok, so no length truncation is done before sending and you thin twitter is rejecting the message if its >140chars?

I'll trim it and set it off again, thanks Steve, I thought Cumulus or Twitter would just chop the end off a message if it was to long

stevew wrote:I thought Cumulus or Twitter would just chop the end off a message if it was to long

I don't know what Twitter does, but I guess I too assumed it would just truncate it. I suppose Cumulus ought to truncate it. From a support point of view, it doesn't really matter either way. If tweets mysteriously stop appearing (as now) then someone will start a thread as you have done (quite rightly), and if they start getting truncated the same thing will happen. Except it will be much more obvious what the problem is in that case! So I guess it's the sensible thing to do, and it's an easy change.

Ive shortened the message its tweeting again. I was looking to find the max length of each message element to help construct it but had to just work it out with some previous examples, anyway seems top be working now so it does look like thats what the issue was