Twitter Tools not updating

For what it’s worth, I’m also experiencing the issue where Tweet digests don’t autocreate. It was working for me with WP2.9.1 and an earlier install of Twitter Tools. The bit.ly plugin works great, though, as does tweeting out new blog posts.

Not to criticize the developer unduly (he provides this for free which is highly commendable) but I roll my eyes at the irony of him more-or-less calling us idiots yet then he plugs his WordPress support business at the end. Suggested dialogue for the future:

“Wow, man. I’m sorry to hear that this plug-in isn’t working for you. As I’m sure you can appreciate, it’s tough to take into account all the variables that WordPress can throw at you. We created a support centre where you can pursue this further. Unlike the plug-in, it’s not free but in order to have dedicated support we have to charge for it.”

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Just sayin’.

Yep, unfortunately I’m one of those who it is not working for, not completely anyway. Post are not getting tweeted and Tweets are not getting put into digest.

I liked the post to tweet function, as I then had twitter notify facebook. For the time being I guess I’ll look into some direct relationship between wordpress post to facebook. But I’ll check back on Twitter Tools from time to time to see if it’s working again.

This looks like a problem with json_decode. I put some logging code in the Twitter Tools code that does the tweet updates, and while the data returned from Twitter includes ID numbers like 8014259753, once these are decoded via the call to json_decode() they are all turned into 2147483647. As far as I can see this is happening within the native PHP implementation of json_decode in PHP v5.2.3 (tested with a v. simple PHP page), so perhaps this is now happening due to the changes in Twitter Tools v2.1, v2.1.1, and v2.1.2 which seem related to changing whether Services_JSON is called or not?

Found a way to fix it by converting the ID numbers to strings before calling json_decode (thanks to this question & answers on stackoverflow.com). See below for edit to twitter-tools.php in /wp_content/plugins/twitter-tools:

$data = $snoop->results;

	// hash results to see if they're any different than the last update, if so, return
	$hash = md5($data);
	if ($hash == get_option('aktt_update_hash')) {
		update_option('aktt_last_tweet_download', time());
		update_option('aktt_doing_tweet_download', '0');
		do_action('aktt_update_tweets');
		return;
	}

	//CJW 2010-01-25: Fix problem with json_decode limiting the id values to PHP_INT_MAX
	// Convert id numbers to strings, with thanks to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1777382/php-jsondecode-on-a-32bit-server
	$data = preg_replace('/"id":(\d+)/', '"id":"$1"', $data);

	$tweets = json_decode($data);

So now my tweets are being updated correctly, will need to wait till tonight to see if my daily digest post is created correctly. ??

No daily digests yet, but the tweets in the sidebar are up to date now, and refresh correctly.

Thanks for the code, cjwalsh! That appears to fix my issues…

I don’t use the digest, but cjwalsh’s fix appears to be working for me as well. Thanks!

@cjwalsh Your fix worked for us too! Thank you very much! I hope you’ll forward your correction to Mr. King.

I think what we (and subsequently Mr. King) is experiencing here is the end result of a total monopoly on Twitter integration in WordPress.

The plugin has been updated to v2.2 to include this fix ??

Still not sure why the digests haven’t been working. Played around with it a bit and managed to manually get it to update for past dates, so now that it’s back in sync maybe it will be OK going forward?

TT was working fine for me until the update…now I haven’t had a new tweet show up for 2 days. Anyone have any idea what would cause this?

My install stopped working too. Previously PHP 5.3.0 broke TT 2.1.1, so I moved back to PHP 5.2.9. Now TT 2.2.1 is broken in PHP 5.2.9. I get the same errors as before: fsockopen(): unable to connect to twitter.com:80 (php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: System error)

Reading AK’s website, the only thing I can think is this is due to a 64 vs. 32 bit issue since he hasn’t tested these changes on a 32bit install of PHP (which I’m running). But who knows.

Rough translation:

Hi, this is your server. Unfortunately I can’t connect to Twitter.com. This is either my fault because I’m not configured right, Twitter’s fault because Twitter is down, or something like that. Please don’t blame Alex, he can’t be responsible for my ability to connect to Twitter.

Alex,

I’m sorry if that came across as “this is definitely your fault”. I mean more than, it seems odd that I upgrade to PHP 5.3, it breaks 2.1.1 (and remained broken during all use of 5.3, which was for like a week). I downgrade to PHP 5.2.9 and it immediately starts working. I upgrade to TT 2.2.1, and it immediately breaks again with the same error as before, when the fixes in 2.2.x, from what I can tell, were related to the tw_id being treated as a string rather than number, and a 32bit PHP is going to have difficulty with numbers that large rather than strings.

Could be circumstantial… I fully understand that as a Sys Admin, but your site admits that you haven’t tested these changes on 32bit PHP. =/

Though I’ll certainly admit, the error seems to indicate an inability to connect to twitter, rather than an integer being too big for the PHP arch. But, it’s an odd coincidence. =/

Moved site to a 64-bit PHP install and TT now works. Again, could be coincidence, but… would be interesting to see if moving it back to 32-bit would break it again…

It seems that the problem may not be Twitter tools…the problem is with twitter…I have a client’s account that I have been trying to make work. It was working just fine with Twitter tools…as are several other sites I manage…but then suddenly stopped working.

I deactivated and installed several other twitter plugins…ALL to no avail. It seems that Twitter is not allowing the connection…

So this is either a server issue or a twitter issue…

If we take that information and move forward how do we fix the problem…???