Shannon Whitley

I’ve received a couple of emails recently from blog owners who have had issues with Chat Catcher.  They may have seen several tweets on Twitter, but those tweets haven’t appeared on their blog.  That can be frustrating.  Now, from my perspective, that’s a good thing.  It means bloggers have come to rely on Chat Catcher and it’s an important feedback tool, but then again, that’s not a comforting thought when you’re missing important comments.

I spent months developing, testing, and beta testing Chat Catcher.  The core code is solid.  It’s not perfect (like most applications) and there are always things that can be improved, but there are not that many true “bugs” that result in missed comment posts.  So what’s happening?  Why might I see a blog comment on Twitter that doesn’t make it to my blog?  There are several points-of-failure outside of Chat Catcher.  I hope this list will be helpful in explaining how some of these issues occur.

Twitter Search - Twitter Search (or Summize) is the source of Chat Catcher’s data.  If there are any issues, any lags, any slight outages, Chat Catcher will be affected.  It’s possible to see something in your Twitter timeline that hasn’t made it yet to Twitter Search.  Although Twitter Search is an excellent service and very reliable, it’s just as subject to issues as any other Internet application.

Your Blog – If Chat Catcher finds a direct link to one of your blog posts in a tweet, it will lookup the post from your server.  If your server is a little slow or perhaps unavailable at the time that Chat Catcher comes by, then Chat Catcher can’t pull the information that’s necessary to post the comment back to your blog.  Your blog is an important part of the lookup phase.  It doesn’t matter if the tweet contains a full link or a shortened URL.

Url Shorteners – Normally, Chat Catcher can translate shortened URLs to long URLs for any service.  The URL shortening services, however, play an extremely important role.  The service (tinyurl.com, bit.ly, tr.im, is.gd, snipurl.com, etc.) must be functioning properly.  Occasionally, these services have problems and Chat Catcher is unable to translate a shortened link.  There are also certain services that don’t provide a standard redirect for the shortened URL to your blog.  An example is Adjix.com.  I recently worked with Adjix and setup Chat Catcher to use their specialized process, but there are other services that might require special tweaking too.  It’s also possible that some services have blocked Chat Catcher.  A URL shortening service provider could see Chat Catcher as a nuisance and actually block Chat Catcher from retrieving URLs.  Although I don’t have this problem with the major vendors, it is possible that smaller providers might block Chat Catcher requests.

Your Blog, Again – Chat Catcher posts comments to your blog.  The comments can come through the WordPress plugin, the PHP script, a pingback, or a standard trackback.  You can picture Chat Catcher just as you would any visitor to your blog.  Chat Catcher pulls your blog up in a virtual browser and is subject to the same problems that a human visitor might have at your site.  What if your blog is a little slow (due to taffic on your blog or a problem with your webhost)?  How about new plugins or theme changes?  Has your blog been hacked (I’ve seen many hacked blogs where the owner isn’t even aware of it)?  What if you are in the process of publishing a new post just as Chat Catcher tries to post a comment?  Your database doesn’t have to allow both updates to happen.  Sometimes one of your visitor’s sessions will timeout during a comment post.  The same thing can happen to Chat Catcher.

No Excuses

The purpose of this post is not to excuse hiccups in the Chat Catcher process.  It’s not perfect, but I’m constantly making improvements.  There are many things that I can do to workaround the shortcomings, and I will develop those solutions.  In the meantime, I hope this helps you understand a few of the challenges involved in running a service like Chat Catcher, and I hope you’ll understand if there are problems from time-to-time.  I’ll work to the best of my ability to improve your experience and keep things running smoothly.