When Twitter stops working…

Yes, folks. Twitter killed my site today, it’s official.

Twitter sh*tterWhat I learned today is that if you build stuff into your site that refers to external sites (like Twitter, Viddler, YouTube etc) you go down when they go down.

Our site was getting stuck loading. I tracked it to problem connecting with Twitter. Twitter’s server timed out. Checks showed that Twitter was down. The only thing I could do was remove the Twitter feed widget from my sidebar. Pity really. I quite liked that quick news headline function.

Can you afford your site being impossibly slow all day because an external site is down and your site keeps on trying to connect to it? Probably not. So the choice is ‘take it, leave it or hope that Wordpress developers code a way around it’.

[6 hours later and it's still slowing everything down when I activate the Twitter widget, so it's out on its ear]

June 30, 2008 | Filed Under GRRRR!!!, blogging technique, news 

Comments

Leave a Reply