I installed the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress on my blog here earlier in the week. I noticed on Thursday night that it stopped working. I did a little troubleshooting on it and found that the call to the authenticated Twitter API URLs were giving back a 301 response instead of a 200. Previously, when I wrote a new post, my Twitter status would update with the title and link to the post. It was a great way to shamelessly self-promote my blog to those following the Gestalt Twitter friends of status. Some call it spam, I prefer to think of it as “direct marketing”.
It appears Twitter made some changes to their load balancing setup and that is not playing nice with previously working consumers of the API like the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress. I think I have a way around the problem but that means I need to add some code to Twitter Tools. If I write code then the guys back at the office might start to freak out. You see, my specialty is running GoTo meetings, a projector (questionable there), and ScrumWorks. This was first pointed out by James Lorenzen. Never ones to disappoint when it comes to boosting their Scrum Master’s self-esteem, James’ team members jumped in on the fun. I’d hate to ruin my reputation with those guys but I may have to. My spam operation…errrr…direct marketing efforts demand it.