Muskblog: Making the Internet better since 1995

I lived in Nuremberg Germany for a couple months while working on an ill fated revision to ZooPlus.de. This was during the dot com boom / bust so I worked a lot of hours and didn’t get to enjoy living in Europe much. I did travel on three weekends, once to Paris, once to Luxembourg, and once to Prague. On the way back from Prague knowing my time working was coming to an end I asked myself, if I could go anywhere in Europe, where would I go?

On Tuesday of last week Twitter shut down version 1.0 of their API. This change had been a long time coming, there was ample warning. I fixed all the code I wrote in PHP months ago, but what never got fixed was my favourite Twitter client. I’ve been a loyal user of Twitbird Pro for years. I paid for this client and stuck with it even though updates had become non-existant. On Tuesday I learned why, the company that makes Twitbird Pro has basically abandoned all their paying customers without even informing them that the software would ceased to be maintained anymore…

During my lengthy period of unemployment one of the suggestions I was given was to become an iPhone developer as I actually was a professional software developer coding in Objective-C over ten years ago…

I keep trying to improve my various web mashups as APIs change and I pick up a new trick or two. Alas in 2019 I think many of the APIs I was using have become much more restrictive. One idea I had was to decrease the number of albums from every CD I own to say one hundred. I thought this would make the code run better as a lot of effort is spent trying to find information about obscure albums. Even my top 100 albums includes some unusual choices…

Twitter is removing support for RSS feeds in a few days. If you actually used the RSS feed feature of the original Twitter API this is disappointing. Twitter wants to know who is making every single request to their API whereas RSS is fairly anonymous…