Dabr blog

 

OK, so @Dabr is down. Here's why -

UPDATE: We're back! If you can't get the site to load, use http://test2.dabr.co.uk

[You may notice some small cosmetic changes as well as a couple of additional features; it's thanks to @edent that we're able to roll these out earlier than planned. Good work sir.]

__________________________________

Dabr has been down now for just over 24hrs and [although we do run into server problems from time to time], this particular issue took us by surprise. I've been in touch with the rest of the team and it seems the fault lies with WebFusion UK.

David has just forwarded me the following email:

Our Data Center operations team have identified an unausally high load on the node your VPS is situated on.This appears to have been caused by your container. Initial attempts to restart the container/terminate the culprit processes failed, leading to the suspension of your container until such a point that a System Administrator can investigate this issue further. 

If we can be of any further help with regard to this or any other matter, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind Regards

WebFusion UK

At the time of writing, David is on hold with WebFusion UK's telephone support to try and get this issue resolved as a matter of urgency. Man, I hate it when this stuff happens at the weekend.

We're really sorry about this folks, stay tuned and we'll update when we're back online.

To stay up to date in real time, don't forget to follow @dabr on Twitter.

 

Posted by James Whatley 

Comments [15]

Where else can you use @Dabr?

This post is inspired by superstar @Dabr user @Supakitsune

Last week, our keen eyes spotted this tweet

On the Nintendo DSi?! Amazing! Being an interested bunch, we asked for a twitpic and naturally, @Supakitsune obliged -

Dual-screen @Dabr FTW!

Not soon after that, our favourite open source hacker/developer legend, @edent, reached out and said -

'Hey, what about me?'

He's tried (the text only version of) @Dabr on Lynx -

And on his Amazon Kindle!

Now it's over to you...

 

What's the coolest, non-mobile phone-based place you've used @Dabr?

Answers in the comments please :)

 

Filed under  //   DSi   amazon   dabr   devices   edent   kindle   lynx   mobile   nintendo   supakitsune  
Posted by James Whatley 

Comments [8]

Avoiding Twitter.com

Employers and schools aren't usually very keen on social networks - they like to block things like Twitter and Facebook to make sure you're more productive. I disagree with this and think that some use of social networks can be beneficial in both environments.

A whole bunch of you used to use Dabr to bypass the blocks that your employer or schools put in place, then Twitter's latest login changes made that more difficult. Today we've added a new feature that hopefully lets you continue to use Dabr wherever you need it.

The one requirement for this feature to work is that you need to log in at least once from a computer that does have access to Twitter. Sorry, that's unavoidable. You can do it from your home PC, your phone, anything, it doesn't matter - once you've done that you can visit the Dabr settings screen and fill in a password, anything you like, for your Dabr account and from then on in you can use this new account to sign in to Dabr.

Our standard login screen...

Dabr-home

... the new extra login screen...

Dabr-login

...and the little extra bit on the settings screen:

Dabr-register

Dabr August updates

Hi Dabr fans!

Today a fairly major change was made to Dabr - all users not already using "Sign in with Twitter" were logged out. (aka OAuth)

This is a necessary change as Twitter will no longer allow users to sign in to Twitter in any other way as of the end of this month - and it's also the reason why some of you have experienced bizarre API limits such as "20 hits per hour". There's a little bit more information over at http://countdowntooauth.com/ if you're interested.

Once you've logged back into Dabr with this more secure method, everything will carry on working as usual. About the only difference you'll see is that Twitpic is working again and your tweets will show "from Dabr" rather than "from dabr".

Along with the big login change are a few tweaks from our great code contributor @edent too:

  • Bug fix for list subscribers
  • Bug fix for icons on the dark Kris' Purple theme
  • List counts
  • Retweet counts (when available)
  • Profile locations now point to Google Maps

So what's next?

For quite a while now, I've been getting ready to move into my new house. That's happened (and it looks great!), but now I'm waiting for a phone line to be fitted so I can get a decent internet connection. Hopefully once that's all in place I can resume my plans to improve Dabr.

If you've got any great ideas about new directions Dabr can go, or if you yourself want to take part in the planning, maintenance or development of Dabr then leave a comment or get in touch to let us know how you'd like to help. Right now is a perfect time to show your support, ready for when core development gets back on track.

Happy tweeting.

@davidcarrington

It's the @Dabr stat attack!

Recently, Twitter recently released some rather impressive stats about their users and their usage habits. Taking our lead from Ev and the gang, we thought we'd pull together some facts and figures of our own based on what we actually get through here at Dabr HQ.

First of all, some overall download stats:

Next question - and this is where we hit the big numbers - what does one month of Dabr look like? Well it breaks down a little bit like this:

  • The 487 thousand of you that used dabr.co.uk in the last month
  • Clicked on 38 million pages throughout the site
  • Peaking at 1.4 million page views in one day
  • Making the server request 1TB of data from Twitter's API
  • And sending you 350GB of mobile web pages to your phones
  • 50% of you were using Opera Mini
  • 62% of you came from Indonesia
  • You uploaded 15 thousand TwitPic photos,
  • You looked at Justin Bieber's profile 12 thousand times
  • And we spent a mere £35 to keep things running smoothly
Thank you for your continued support.
 
You rock.
 

Filed under  //   dabr   facts   figures   numbers   stats  
Posted by James Whatley 

Comments [12]

Location sharing with @Dabr

When we added the display of Geolocation recently, quite a few of you asked us when we were going to add the sharing of locations to Dabr.

Well here it is!

Media_httpfarm5static_qusxy

Starting today, a few compatible handsets will now get prompted to allow Dabr to share your location like the photo above.

So far we know the following devices work: iPhones, iPads, Android phones and the N900 too.

Enjoy!

Dabr – Reply to all and Geotagging – via @edent

People have been very excited to see some new functionality in Dabr – the mobile Twitter client I develop for. But what is it and how does it work?

@@ and geotag

@@ and geotag

Reply to All

The @@ symbol allows you to reply to all the people mentioned within the tweet.
It only shows up on tweets which mention other users – so you should only ever see it when it can be used.

Hitting @@ on the above tweet will pre-populate the text box with “@topgold @whatleydude @dabr”.

It should remove any duplicates and should also remove your username.

Geotagging

Twitter recently allowed the geotagging of tweets. This allows you to set the longitude and latitude of where you are when you wrote your message.
Clicking on the green globe (it just looks like a dot at that size!) takes you to a mobile mapping service.

Google Maps Mobile

Google Maps Mobile

It only shows up on tweets which are geotagged – so you should only ever see it when it can be used.

How Does It Work?

You can see all the code in the SVN, but here’s a quick rundown.

Geotagging is very simple.  Statuses now have a <geo> field.  If this is populated, it will contain a longitude and latitude.

We can take those values and pass them to Google Maps Mobile (or your favourite mobile mapping service).
if ($geo !== null)
{
   $latlong = $geo->coordinates;
   $lat = $latlong[0];
   $long = $latlong[1];
   $actions[] = theme('action_icon', "http://maps.google.co.uk/m?q={$lat},{$long}", 'images/map.png', 'MAP');
}

Reply to all is a little more involved.
Twitter provide an excellent set of Text Libraries. These provide officially sanctioned regular expressions to help your project find URLs, hashtags and usernames.

Using the Twitter Text Extractor class we can determine how many usernames are mentioned in a tweet. Any duplicates are removed – as is the user’s username.

Any questions – just ask!

 

 

This update comes from one of @Dabr's more prolific coders, Sir Terence of Eden - aka @edent..

Terence runs his own version of Dabr using the open-source code and has been playing and updating now for some time. With permission, David went through the main service and applied the awesome changes you can see above...

What do you think?
Do you - like @topgold - like these new features?

Cheers,
James

Filed under  //   dabr   edent   reply all   updates  
Posted by James Whatley 

Comments [6]

Dabr migration and Apache

Some techy stuff about how I migrated Dabr to it's new home last month, cross posted from one of my other blogs:

After a recent purchase of VPS hosting from WebFusion, I wanted to move my high-traffic site dabr.co.uk onto it. With the site exceeding one million daily page views, I really had to be careful about how I’d move the site to it’s new home.

10%

Using the “Hostnames” report within Google Analytics, I was able to identify that 10% of users access the site via the m subdomain and 40% use www – the rest not using any subdomain at all. This was a real stroke of luck as it allowed me to test the new server with a controllable percentage of the total traffic, simply by updating the DNS records.

When given 10% load the VPS handled just fine, so after two days I moved on and tried it with 50%.

50%

A second report from Google Analytics also helped tremendously: hourly visits. With about 45% of hits coming from Indonesia (yes, really), I needed to know what time was the best window to try any drastic changes to the servers. The graph clearly shows that the longest quiet period I get is between 6pm and 9pm GMT – when most of Indonesia is asleep and web traffic drops in half:

On the first few occasions that I did try 50% of the load pointing at the new server – it buckled and almost completely fell over. A chat with Nick, a friend from Heavy Sumo, led me to explore the Apache configuration – and what a bizarre experience that was.

Here’s the settings that were used by default on the server, compared with the Apache defaults and the settings on the old server:

Setting WebFusion VPS Apache default Old server
StartServers 1 5 8
MinSpareServers 1 5 5
MaxSpareServers 5 10 20
MaxClients 10 256 256
MaxRequestsPerChild 0 1000 4000

Notice the difference?

I have no idea why WebFusion would have their defaults so low. Changing these to match the settings of the old server had a significant boost on performance.

I left 50% traffic on the new server for a couple of weeks, and tried a couple of times to add a bit more, but users quickly complained about the site slowing down.  The slow down matched up to the Indonesian peak time around 2pm GMT, so I rolled back the DNS to point to the old server again.

90%

This stage required a little further exploration of Apache performance tuning articles. One interesting fact I discovered was that Apache has a hard-coded MaxClients limit of 256, which you can only raise by recompiling Apache – so that wasn’t particularly an ideal option.

The Apache Performance Tuning article from devside.net was the answer to my problems. It suggested a number of different solutions, two of which were to adjust Keep Alive and Timeout settings.

Setting Webfusion VPS Devside
Timeout 300 45
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 80
KeepAliveTimeout 15 2

These changes, combined with the forking settings above, have made the server run much more smoothly. In fact, it’s now taking 100% of the traffic and people are noticing an improvement in speed.

100%

With the new server running well for a month, I then asked the previous host to delete the old server. Hopefully the new server should last a while before I need to consider load balancing to a second server.

 

Filed under  //   apache   dabr  

Three quarters of the way

724,359

It's a fairly big number, about three quarters of a million I'd say.

Quite a nice number when that's page views in one day on dabr.co.uk!

Thank to the 25,000 visitors that came to the site on Sunday and decided to send out 135,000 tweets :)

Dabr in Indonesia

Media_httpfarm5static_gzydb

If you read my personal blog then you already know I'm a huge fan of Google Analytics - It really is the daddy. It tells me a lot of things about how people use my sites but it failed me in one way recently.

It told me that there was a 45% drop in visits to dabr.co.uk from Indonesia that lasted 20 hours last month (one day basically). You can see the little drop on January 6th affecting the total visits graph above. But what it couldn't do was tell me why.

That's where Twitter came in. After tweeting my interest in what happened on the 6th Jan in Indonesia, it was revealed that an important soccer match occurred on that very day: Indonesia vs Oman. Could it really be a soccer match that caused such a drop?

A while later I was told that one of the major telecoms providers had serious downtime - and that's something I can investigate in Analytics. After playing around with a custom report I found a 100% drop in usage from that provider during the exact period. Without a doubt this must have been the true cause.

A recent addition to Analytics is "annotations", which gives me the ability to label this anomaly for future reference just in case I forget. Thanks Google :)

Incidentally, the drop had such an impact on Dabr's overall stats because of one simple fact: visits from Indonesia make up almost half of all traffic to the site!