2
Jun
The USDA unveiled their new tool to replace the trusty old food pyramid we all learned as kids – the plate icon.
According to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, “It’s an opportunity for Americans to understand quickly how to have a balanced and nutritious meal. It’s a constant reminder as you look at your own plate whether your portion sizes are right, whether you’ve got enough fruits and vegetables on that plate.”
The new info can be found on the USDA website: ChooseMyPlate.gov
Rather than show the plate icon here, I have decided to create a plate icon of what I eat.
June 2, 2011 in: Commentary - 1 Comment
31
May
I was playing around with the Facebook Graph API using the PHP SDK to upload photos and was having some issues.
I kept getting “CurlException: 26: failed creating formpost data” and was certain my code was solid. Turns out, this indicated a permissions issue with the photo I was trying to upload to Facebook. I checked, and certainly enough, my photo permissions were “No Access” to the picture for users other than myself on Mac OS X. I then set the permissions for “Everyone” to “Read Only” and all is working fine and dandy now.
Here is my working code for uploading a photo from the same directory as the PHP page communicating with Facebook:
$facebook->setFileUploadSupport(true);
$args = array(
'message' => 'I am awesome.',
'image' => '@' . realpath('awesome.jpeg')
);
try {
$data = $facebook->api('/me/photos', 'post', $args);
} catch(FacebookApiException $e) {
echo "ERROR: " . $e;
}
May 31, 2011 in: Technology - No Comments
29
Apr
Recently, TweetChat was hit hard by bots emanating from the Amazon Web Service (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
On their heaviest day, they accounted for 15 GB of traffic. Yeah, that is no fun.
Geographically speaking, these bots were all hitting my service from IP blocks coming from their EU (Ireland) datacenter.
I used this handy chart available on Amazon’s forums to block all future traffic from Amazon’s EU EC2 service. Problem solved, for now…
April 29, 2011 in: Commentary, Technology - No Comments
19
Apr
I was recently looking at some of TweetChat‘s site traffic and saw a few interesting uses of my service from three high-profile sources.
CBS
CBS daytime talk show, The Talk is using TweetChat for a “Tweet Up Tuesday” where viewers discuss a question in real time as the show is live on the air.
New York Times
The New York Times held a #nytmuseums chat to discuss the use of social media in museums and promoted the chat in one of their articles.
Seventeen Magazine
Seventeen Magazine offers you the monthly opportunity to go on a Twitter Date with one of Seventeen’s Hot Guy Panelists using the #17HotGuys hashtag.
It is always cool to see something you created being used for reasons you never could have imagined. Now if I could just come up with a business model…
April 19, 2011 in: Commentary, Technology - No Comments
