Yes! We finally did it! The WordPress masters of disasters have given us a brand new look, same old bird!… I always believed that the “White as Milk” free template from the WordPress.org directory would be here for like a few weeks, which unfortunately lasted for over two months *sigh* well, it’s all gone now anyway, so goodbye old milk ;)

Still having probs here with the widgetized area (there are four of them actually), especially the Twitter part, which was lagging yesterday due to Twitter fail. Seems to be up and running today, so everything turned out quite good, and remember – we always appreciate your comments and suggestions.

Thanks & always yours,
~ @kovshenin

We’ve just received approval from Twitter for our 20,000 Twitter API calls per hour! Isn’t that great?

Some updates were made to Foller.me last night, you can view those at the semi-public beta over here: beta.foller.me – recent queries are now working, completely changed the stopwords removal algorithm (works much faster) and changed the linking structure. You can see now that the tags in the recent @mentions section link to their profiles on Foller.me. The tag cloud builder was also optimized, people with few tweets now look not worse than @cnn ;)

Also, I’ve finally managed to get a grid-service hosting account from Media Temple. Moved the blog and the beta over to the new place this morning and everything seems to work just great! They’ve got a well-structured control panel by the way, I really loved it.

The Firefox and IE search plugins are done and work fine, though we’re not releasing those public before the actual public beta release of Foller.me (domain conflicts). The release date of the first public beta is set to be 1st of June. Hope we do not overdue :)

Thanks for all your support everyone and keep your suggestions coming!

Okay, so the beta is up and everything seems to be okay, apart from the part where we run out of Twitter API calls per hour. Cache? Yeah, there is cache and right now it’s set to cache similar queries, but they get outdated after 60 seconds. I’ll increase that number to an hour or two, depending on server average load.

For those of you who don’t know the URL of the beta (alpha, or whatever you wanna call it) please contact me on Twitter. I’m @kovshenin. I’ll need your feedback in comments BTW.

Hey there. Well, I’ve nothing to write here yet, though there’s quite a lot going on behind the scenes right now. You might be wondering what’s this all about. I’ll explain it in only a few words, okay? Take me for example. I’ve have around 20 new followers per day on Twitter. I really love to follow back, but I don’t follow back everyone, because I wouldn’t like spamish stuff going on in my Friends Timeline.

How do I decide? Well, honestly.. I open up my Inbox, browse through every profile of a new follower I get. I look at his bio, and I look at his 20 recent tweets. It takes me quite a long time to run through all 20 per day. And what about fridays? I can get around 30-50 on a friday, and that’s even more time-consuming.

So, I’ve decided to create a Twitter service, that would save you (and me) all that time. Tag clouds! You all know tag clouds, don’t you? So what if you had a tag cloud version of some tweep, generated from his latest 200-300 tweets? That’d be great wouldn’t it?

Anyway, there’s a lot more to this service than just a tag cloud of tweets. We’re currently pending API extension approval from Twitter to get 20,000 API calls per hour and testing an alpha (or beta) version of foller.me.

Have a good day.