Update (saturday nov 7th, 14.00): Twitterfountains work properly once more. Happy Fountains!
Lately, we get some concerned emails regarding failing Twitterfountains. The fountain says “Twitter search failed. Please refresh the page.”. Unfortunately, there is nothing we at Twitterfountain can do about that right now.
The root of the error has to do with a so-called crossdomain.xml file that is hosted on Twitter’s servers. Everytime you start a Twitterfountain, we send a request to that specific file. Earlier this week, it was accidentally removed by twitter, and subsequently replaced. But now it has stopped accepting ‘calls’ from third parties. Thus crippling Twitterfountains and other (mostly flash-based) Twitter applications.
We are awaiting response from Twitter, to hear if this change is permanent or not. In the meantime, we are researching viable alternatives. Hang in there.
Recently we’ve been working on updating the Twitterfountain. We’re looking for ways to make the application cleaner and at the same time provide more options to customize its look and animations.
To summarize the updates we’ve done so far:
- a cleaner look and feel of the whole application
- a less intrusive title bar
- a cleaner ’settings’ panel, with tabs for messages, images and embedding options.
- option for animation style of twitter messages
- option for showing a background box behind the twitter message
As you can see from this screenshot, you can achieve a very clean looking app. In this case, the background box of the twitter message is disabled, images are disabled, and the animation just fades the messages in and out.
The next screenshot shows the new settings panel, subdivided into tabs. You can also see the option for choosing different message animations. Currently you can choose between the ‘old’ vertical animation, and a more subtle fading animation.
Please review the demo here!
When the new version is finished all “old” twitterfountains running on websites, blogs and events will automatically be replaced by the new one. Backwards compatibility should be ensured.
Comments and suggestions are more than welcome!
Recently we’ve received several comments about #tags not working when searching for tweets, or flickr tags. We’ve been doing some testing and finally discovered that the bug had to do with the javascript embed code, and how this code passes #tags onto the flash movie.
For now we’ve fixed this by adjusting the embed code: when you want to use a Twitterfountain that searches for tweets that start with ‘#’, we recommend you copy and paste a new embed code in your blog, by using the ‘embed code‘ button in any twitterfountain.
You can also adjust the code by hand, in that case you need to replace all the ‘#‘ characters with ‘%23‘. For example:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.twitterfountain.nl/embed/twitterfountain.js?fv_event=%23twitterfountain, fv_flickr=twitterfountain,fv_kleur=FF6600, fv_animationtype=1, fv_showtint=true, width=400, height=300″></script>
We have had a fun ride with Twitterfountain so far, and have enjoyed the increase in attention for Twitterfountain over the last months! One thing that bugged us, was that we did not have time or resources available to respons to your replies and requests very often, given that we created Twitterfountain in our spare time.
Today, we are happy to tell you that that situation has changed. Shortly, we will be able to dive back into the code and create a completely new and improved Twitterfountain.
Therefor, we invite you to give us your feedback, so we can incorporate it in the upcoming new version! Please use the feedback-tab on the right of the screen, or go here and add your requests and vote on other’s requests! We are looking forward to your response!
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Twitterfountain developer @eerkmans attended the Tokyo2.0 event in Club Superdeluxe (famous for its Pecha Kucha nights) and saw our Twitterfountain in use. Check this video:
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