Originally I had planned (and hoped) that the simplistic nature of Twitt-Twoo would be a good thing. But due to the rising poularity of Twitter in general it seems that going off and requesting my current status everytime a page loads is not particularly good.
Sure its fine when the Twitter service is ok, but it is frequently “delayed. And due to the position I have Twitt-Twoo in, this “delay” stops the rest of my sidebar loading until it finishes doing it magic. I had a suggestion just after I first launched Twitt-Twoo, to perhaps implement some sort of cahcing to reduce the need for the Twitter feed to be access every time a page is loaded.
So over the past few days (well, when I wasn’t spending stupid amounts of time at work over the weekend) I have been working on implementing this ‘caching’ idea. I think its almost there, but I will hold off releasing it until I’m happy with it, which hopefully should be too long.
The method I am using involves storing the latest ‘tweet’, the time for that tweet, and the last time twitter was checked. Now when the plugin loads, it checks the ‘last checked’ time and if it was less than 10 minutes ago it just pulls out the status and time from my WordPress db. If its been longer than 10 minutes, then it goes off (server side) and updates the latest tweet in the database etc.
I’m using the updated version right now, so I would like any feedback regarding load times, andwhether or not you still notice that the sidebar “freezes” because its waiting forTwitt-Twoo. Providing I don’t come accross any major problems, and the general feedback is good I will try and get Twitt-Twoo 1.1 released by the end of the week.
To eliminate the freeze, you can use AJAX to load information coming from external servers.
Plugin seems to work fine Dean.