Twitter Updates for 2008-06-22

***Post Removed shortly after 12am 24 June***

WARNING: My modifications to the Twitter Tools plugin broke the daily update posts. Do not attempt these changes unless you want to break the daily updates on your installation of Twitter Tools

Looks like the Twitter Tools plugin has gone slightly cuckoo and decided to repost the last daily digest. I think the reason it did that is because I disabled and then re-enabled the daily digests as Twitter Tools seemed to be stuck in the wrong timezone.

We’ll see if it’s feeling any better soon I suppose.

Update 1:13am: It seems to be storing tweet creation times in UTC rather than local time but storing the time it downloaded them in local time. I suppose I’ll find out around 10am if it’s worked out that I’m in Canberra and not London. I’ll see if I can find out anything more about this weird behaviour before then. End Update

Update 2:09am: It’s apparently a known issue, but not one that’s likely to be officially fixed any time soon. I didn’t find anything useful on Google either, so I went looking through the plugin and found this section related to digest creation starting on line 214:

$now = ak_gmmktime();
$yesterday = strtotime(‘-1 day’, $now);
$last_post = get_option(‘aktt_last_digest_post’);

if ($last_post != date(‘Y-m-d 00:00:00’, $yesterday)) {
$days = ceil((strtotime(date(‘Y-m-d 00:00:00’, $yesterday)) – strtotime($last_post)) / (3600 * 24));
}
else {
$days = 1;
}
for ($i = 0; $i < $days; $i++) { $n = $days - $i; $digest_day = strtotime('-'.$n.' days', $now); $tweets = $wpdb->get_results(”
SELECT *
FROM $wpdb->aktt
WHERE tw_created_at >= ‘”.date(‘Y-m-d 00:00:00’, $digest_day).”‘
AND tw_created_at < = '".date('Y-m-d 23:59:59', $digest_day)."' GROUP BY tw_id ORDER BY tw_created_at

Which I have altered to read:

$now = ak_gmmktime();
$yesterday = strtotime(‘-1 day’, $now);
$last_post = get_option(‘aktt_last_digest_post’);

if ($last_post != date(‘Y-m-d 10:00:00’, $yesterday)) {
$days = ceil((strtotime(date(‘Y-m-d 10:00:00’, $yesterday)) – strtotime($last_post)) / (3600 * 24));
}
else {
$days = 1;
}
for ($i = 0; $i < $days; $i++) { $n = $days - $i; $digest_day = strtotime('-'.$n.' days', $now); $tweets = $wpdb->get_results(”
SELECT *
FROM $wpdb->aktt
WHERE tw_created_at >= ‘”.date(‘Y-m-d 10:00:00’, $digest_day).”‘
AND tw_created_at < = '".date('Y-m-d 09:59:59', $now)."' GROUP BY tw_id ORDER BY tw_created_at

Basically I’ve added ten hours (the difference between Canberra’s timezone and GMT), hopefully that will fix the problem until it is officially fixed in an update by the plugin’s author. If this works, then I suppose that I’ll need to write a version of the workaround for those people in timezones behind GMT. It should be one extra line and a different variable, but I’ll wait to see if this works first. It hasn’t broken anything yet, so for one of my coding efforts it’s looking promising. End Update

Samuel