Our Singapore server is now back online, with a new number: +65 8262 9845.

Unfortunately, we had to bid farewell to our earlier Singapore number. We are not able to recover it.

Please update your phone or address book with our new Singapore number.

And if you would do us favor, we would appreciate if you could also inform your friends about our new number. :)

Our Singapore number is having issues. We will update at the end of today, May 7. In meantime, do not send in messages to our Singapore number.

Thanks for your understanding.

We have had some technical oppses and have since resolved it. Tweets have been delayed, however. We have increased the flood caps to send out the tweets faster.

This time, the issue has been mostly a mistake on our part. We have failed to take sufficient measures to keep the gladlyCast code base up-to-date and we succumbed issues concerning software regression.

In time, we should be pushing out all the tweets by midnight. We are observing the gladlyCast system closely for a couple of days.

Happy tweeting!

[All tweets have been sent out.]

gladlyCast and gladlyCode went offline for almost 2 hours and back online again at 4:00 PM. All Twitter and Plurk updates from Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines are redelivered. There was some issues with our web provider.

Update on Scheduled Maintenance/Interruption

Rackspace has experienced a service interruption during tonight’s scheduled maintenance on UPS Cluster G. We were testing phase rotation on a Power Distribution Unit (PDU) when a short occurred and caused us to lose the PDUs behind this Cluster. The phase rotation allows us to verify synchronization of power between primary and secondary sources.

All power has been restored and devices are being brought back online. The PDUs were down for a total of about 5 minutes. We have aborted the maintenance for the remainder of the evening and will reschedule this for another date. (Source: Rackspace)

User @neyrashazeyra is first to discover it not working. That said, if you discover gladlyCast not to be functioning correctly, do drop us an email or tweet to us. That will certainly alert us quicker. Also, if you’re interested, TechCrunch is affected too and has more about the Rackspace outage..

gladlyCast is now available in the country of beautiful islands, Philippines.

(Roxas Boulevard taken by jimpg2)

Kumusta po kayo?

Filipinos now can enjoy updating Twitter and Plurk from a local number, with no extra charges, by sending an SMS to +63 929 106 0211.

To sign up and start using the service, you can visit http://gladlyCast.com.

No need to tell us your passwords (for Twitter).
We don’t insert any self-promotional URL in your tweets.
Simply sign in and start gladlyCasting.

Feel free to drop us a comment or DM us at @gladlyCast if you need any help.

First of all, gladlyCast users’ tweets has been delayed from around 6 to 11 pm on Oct 18, Malaysian / Singapore time. This has been partially resolved. Your tweets may not be delivered orderly. Read on if you’re interested in what occurred or if you like bad art.

At around 7:30 pm, we noticed every tweet we attempted to send out failed. We did some troubleshooting and discovered one of the nodes in between gladlyCast and Twitter wasn’t functioning normally. This is a rough diagram to show you what went wrong — the route between gladlyCast and Twitter has been disrupted:

We got a little relieved knowing other Twitter services such as TwitPic are also having similar network issues. When we are quite certain one of the nodes of Twitter’s provider NTT America has failed, we tweeted a short explanation:

It’s 10 pm and the route between gladlyCast and Twitter is unlikely to recover soon. However not all routes are affected, we can successful update Twitter using one of our laptops.

We decided to implement a temporary measure to pull all the tweets from our outbox into one of our laptops. This laptop then acts as the server to Twitter, creating a successful alternate route. The network diagram looks something like that:

At 11 pm, we successfully sent out the first tweet with one of our laptops. We finally got the time to read your responses. We got some angry tweets, we got some nice ones too. We understand how timely each SMS update means to you and are just as frustrated as you are over the issue.

Twitter acknowledged the issue couple hours later. We still hope Twitter fixes the problem soon so that we can give the poor laptop proper rest it much deserved.

We wrote this to share with you some issues that can occur when we deliver a tweet. We dedicate this entry to one of our users yy1993 who wanted to know more on running a web server.

We are most excited to announce support for one more conversation universe – Plurk.

We have been discussing on the possibility of supporting Plurk since a month ago. One of the priorities we had is ease of use and reliability that is similar to what we offered for Twitter. We finally agreed our Plurk feature is good to be released for your usage.

Plurk SMS support is offered to Singapore and Malaysian users. To update Plurk with your handphone, just sign in with your existing Plurk email and password. Unlike for Twitter, gladlyCast requires your email and password here.

If you have associated your phone number with Twitter already, sending an SMS to gladlyCast will not only update Twitter but your Plurk too. Have fun (:

In the spirit of Emmys, we’d like to thank you for all the little feedbacks we have been receiving. This feature would not be possible without Plurk too. Thanks everyone.

You should friend us at Plurk too if you have one.

Tips for users with Twitter and Plurk:

• SMS in “w twitter message” or “w t hi” to update Twitter
• SMS in “w plurk hi” or “w p hi” to update Plurk.

We are scheduling a homepage refresh for gladlyCast on September 22, at 2 AM, lasting about 15 minutes. This update enables a pending feature and requires a change in our homepage.

Delivery of Twitter status update is not affected in this update and there is no expected downtime.

So once again, it’s Tuesday morning 2 AM, 15 minutes.

On a totally random note, we have a Plurk page and a purple logo. You can friend us there.

Update 2:00 am: We’re performing tiny homepage and have chosen not to go offline.
Update 2:10 am: Update has been performed – we are supporting another conversation universe – Plurk

gladlyCast now lets you choose which account to update with.

Some users have associated the same phone number to more than one Twitter account and wanted to choose which Twitter account they can update with.

Introducing Update (W)ith

Here’s the format:
w username your message here

If you have 2 Twitter accounts – JohnDoe and ThePublishingCompany and have both associated with the same phone number at gladlyCast, you can SMS in:

• w johndoe good morning
  to tweet as JohnDoe
• w thepublishingcompany we have a year-end promo
  to tweet as ThePublishingCompany

But my username is so loooong

Just type in the first 3 characters (or more) of your username, for example:

• w the we have a year-end promo
  to tweet as ThePublishingCompany.
• w john good morning
  to tweet as JohnDoe.

Thanks and have fun.

We are investigating this issue, too many requests is made in one second.

Meanwhile we allocated more memory resources during this time temporarily.

Update 09:43 pm — Server has been stabilized. We are still in the midst of finding out what happened.
Update 12:12 am Sunday — It began when one of our servers had an overloaded queue due to a bug introduced in a recent update. This server attempted to resend too quickly to another server which couldn’t keep up. The whole chain reaction is the reason for our 2 hour service disruption. We are optimizing our load right now.