Remember the Twitter archive project I finished back in June? Tweet Nest? Yes? Well, a little over a week ago, 3 months after its release, word suddenly spread about it on Twitter. It happened quickly, and suddenly hundreds of people were checking it out, installing it on their own servers and generally having fun with it. This is a pretty awesome thing!

However, with the attention always comes new ideas, new questions and new problems. I will try to address the most common here.

FAQ

First off, I created a Frequently Asked Questions page for Tweet Nest, for (to start off with) the three questions I got most often. The ones that should have been addressed on the Tweet Nest page itself, but where I couldn’t find the space for it. If you’ve got a basic question, I wholeheartedly recommend you give it a look.

Forum

The Pongsocket Forum is in great shape at the moment. It’s recently been refurnished and beautified and it’s still the place to ask if you’ve got a question about Tweet Nest. Below, you can see some notable forum discussions that you might want to check out if your Tweet Nest installation has some issues:

• The tweets are off by 3 days
• loadtweets.php not grabbing *all* tweets?
• Running CRON jobs on MediaTemple
• Archives Not Found

The future

And with all of the new ideas and newfound bugs, it’s only right to look to the future and talk about what it has in store for Tweet Nest! I’m pretty caught up with other projects (not to mention the lovely university I’m attending), but it’s appropriate to look ahead and see what could happen.

Some oft-requested suggestions include:

• Multiuser-support: It was indeed part of the original plan for TN to include support for multiple user accounts, but it quickly made it extra complicated at the time. However, it’s definitely something that makes sense, and hopefully we will see it at some point.
• Favourites and mentions from other users: This gets suggested a lot, but contrary to the above, this is without a doubt something that is out of scope. Your Tweet Nest installation is about your tweets. When it comes to the favourites section, the idea of the Favourites page on Tweet Nest is that they are the best out of the ones in your archive. If you want, you can read me talk more about this here.
• Support private accounts: An essential part of TN’s easy setup is that you don’t need to authenticate yourself to Twitter in any way — Tweet Nest gathers only data which is public anyway. That is, unless you have a private account. This adds some complications in that you have to authenticate, but clearly this needs to be supported. (Originally reported on GitHub.)

And that’s just a handful! Check out the forum for more ideas.

And perhaps best of it all, the good Ryan LeFevre (who works for TwitPic) have created his own fork of Tweet Nest where he rearranges the code into an MVC format and generally tightens things up. His efforts are much appreciated, and will definitely find its way into the next version of the app. His fork is very much worth watching to check out some of the new developments.

If you have your own ideas for Tweet Nest and the power to do something about it, this is the reason it’s open source! Fork it on GitHub and do something awesome with it, then tell me about it! Everybody wins!

Clearly a lot of cool stuff is going with Tweet Nest at the moment, and I couldn’t be more pleased that people are using it and enjoying it. Thanks for all of your support!

…and, if you’re tired of me talking about Tweet Nest, just wait, because soon I’ll have another (and still a secret) totally unrelated project I won’t be able to not talk about. Hoorah!

By the way, if you know of a community where I can share partial and teasing screen shots of future projects, maybe you can give me a poke. Did I mention it’s my birthday today? (No, really!)