Update Wednesday, 11:17 PM EST: Fingers crossed. It looks as if the Twitter API issue has been solved.
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Around last week Wednesday (March 25) we started noticing an increasing number of Twitter API calls getting an HTTP response code of 0 from the PHP cURL call to the API.

On Friday (March 27) the issue reached such proportions that we submitted a Twitter API issue. It was clear at that point that it wasn’t just a temporary glitch in the matrix.

Initially, the Twitter folks thought the issue was a networking problem on our side of the fence, which is quite understandable.

We, with the help of our hosting provider’s technicians, ran tests to troubleshoot the issue.

On Saturday morning we ran conclusive tests that showed the following:

• Calls to the Twitter Search API and to any other web site went through without any issue.
• Calls to the Twitter API went through sometimes, and other times received a Connection Refused, which resulted in the HTTP response code of 0 in the PHP cURL call.

Those tests showed that it was not a networking issue on our side, because only calls to the Twitter API experienced the problem.

Since it was weekend, not much further could be done at that point. We sent through the details to Twitter.

On Monday Twitter further investigated and determined that the issue was not with the site rate limit of TweetLater. We were well within the 20,000 API calls per hour limit.

The logical conclusion was that something somewhere on the Twitter network is (seemingly) randomly blocking API calls from our IP address. This could be a switch, router, firewall, etc.

Currently the Twitter operations staff and hosting provider technicians are investigating to see if they can pinpoint the problem.

There is unfortunately no time to resolution yet, until such time that they can actually pinpoint the root cause of the problem.

We’ll update this post with new information as it becomes available.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, but please understand that the problem is out of our hands.

“How do I get people to see my Twitter profile when there are millions of Twitter users?”

You have probably asked yourself that question, right?

With TweetLater, you can now put your profile in a banner that we display on every single page on TweetLater.com, and we also include the banner in every single keyword email that we send out.

At the time of writing, we were getting more than 36,000 pageviews per day on TweetLater.com, and we were sending out 12,000+ keyword emails per day.

For a period of 24 hours, your Twitter profile can be featured at the top of all those where other Twitter users will see your profile.

Check out our Profile Banners now.

The banners are sold in an auction format so that the price can be completely market-driven.

On Friday night the TweetLater database experienced problems. In the process of repairing the database, some of the records in the follower snap-shot tables were corrupted beyond repair.

To play it safe and not risk sending duplicate DM to your followers, we are rebuilding the follower snap-shots from scratch.

This process has started at around 7:30 AM EST on Saturday, March 14th, and will be completed at around 7:30 PM EST.

During this period you will not see any automation activities (follow, unfollow, welcome DM) happening on your Twitter account.

Normal new follower processing will resume after 7:30 PM EST.

Please check the “Auto Stats” menu tab in your TweetLater account.

Any followers who followed you before the later of 7:30 AM EST and the last auto run shown in Auto Stats will not be processed. They are included in the new snap-shot that we take, and hence will not be identified as new followers. After 7:30 PM EST processing will again be back to normal.

With the change-over on Sunday to daylight savings time, a bug reared its head in TweetLater.

Tweets that were entered into the system before Sunday and that were scheduled to be published after the DST change, were suddenly one hour off the originally intended scheduled time.

Figuring out the correct scheduling time may sound easy, but in actual fact it is not. Different timezones have different change-over rules, and some timezones don’t observe DST.

Try this on for size and see if you understand it.

If the timezone that the user selected observes Daylight Savings Time, then when storing a tweet in the system, you must check if you are currently in DST and whether the scheduled time of the tweet is also in DST, because if the scheduled time is into the next Standard Time then you must adjust the scheduled time so that it will publish one hour later than the time the user selected but if you are currently in Standard Time and the scheduled time of the tweet is in the next DST then you must adjust the scheduled time so that it will publish one hour earlier than the time the user selected, however, when the user views the tweet in the list of tweets or edits the tweet they still must see the original time they selected when they added the tweet, so you have to adjust the scheduled time in reverse to the above when you display the tweet’s scheduled time, and oh by the way, you must also adjust the display of the scheduled times in the same manner for tweets that were published in the previous DST or Standard Time period depending on whether you are currently in a DST or Standard Time period, and if the user’s timezone does not observer DST then you must not do the above to her tweets at all.

Here is what all of that means in plain English:

The issue is now fixed.

TweetLater Professional users, please take note of this. It’s important.

If you connect a TweetLater Blog Feed to the RSS feed of your WordPress blog, and you have the WordPress Twitter Tools plugin installed and configured to publish your Twitter tweets as blog posts, mayhem will ensue.

The Twitter Tools plugin is going to grab a tweet from your Twitter account and publish it as a post on your blog.

Then the Blog Feed is going to grab that blog post and post it as a tweet on your Twitter account.

Then the Twitter Tools plugin is going to grab that new tweet from your Twitter account and publish it as a new post on your blog.

Then the Blog Feed is going to grab that new blog post and post it as a new tweet on your Twitter account.

This is going to go on endlessly and you are going to have hundreds of duplicate blog posts on your blog and hundreds of duplicate tweets in your Twitter account.

Either disconnect the Blog Feed, or disable the Twitter Tools plugin on your blog.

As you probably know by now, TweetLater is all about helping you being productive with your Twittering, and saving you time in the process.

We added a new feature where you can save drafts of tweets, which you then simply select when you compose a new tweet.

Granted, very few people write exactly the same tweet over and over. That’s not where the real power of draft tweets lies.

How often do you find yourself typing the same snippet of text, or copying and pasting the same URL into several tweets?

That’s where draft tweets will save you a lot of time.

Save those text snippets and/or URLs as “draft tweets” and select them from the drop-down list on the New Tweet page as you’re writing the new tweet.

This feature is available to everyone, i.e., TweetLater Free and TweetLater Professional users.

You create a draft tweet on the New Tweet page, by selecting the Save As Draft checkbox and clicking the Save button.