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 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.

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 added a new feature in gladlyCast (for both Singapore and Malaysia) during our previous maintenance. We noticed a few users trying to direct message their friends and Twitter just wouldn’t deliver these messages out. From now on, it will be handled correctly as a direct message.

To send a direct message use:

d username message

For example:

d gladlycast When are you going to support DM via SMS?

This would send a direct message “When are you going to support DM via SMS?” to us if we (gladlyCast) are following you.

Note that while you can send a DM to your friend on Twitter, you cannot receive a DM with your phone. If you’re still unsure about how direct message works in Twitter, take a look at this helpful article from Twitter.

A few of our friends in Malaysia have mentioned us on their blogs. Some even included screenshots and instructions on how to get started with gladlyCast. Here are some that we have found other than those mentioned in our previous post:

• Ariyako.org: Update your Twitter status using SMS (Malay with instructions) — Thanks @ariyako!
• Megat.net: gladlyCast, Update Twitter via SMS for 1 sen (Malay with instructions) — Thank you@megat
• KoN-FuSioN+Mi-A: TWeeT 4 Rm0.01?? -Tips from fellow Blogger (English)
• LIFE IS A REFLECTION: gladlyCast (Malay with instructions) — Many thanks @anuarsalleh!
• BuletinPC.com: Update Twitter via SMS at gladlyCast (Malay) — Props to @buletinpc
• iNicholas: Send Your Tweets to Twitter With SMS in Malaysia (English with comparison) — Kudos to @nicholaschan
• psychopathlove (English) — Kudos to @wyjl
• tazpunye: No excuse for not using Twitter (Malay with comparison) — Thanks to @TazJaafar
• logicallycrapped: Cheaper text tweeting (English) — Thanks to @jgme
• Justkhai: Tutorial: Twitter for beginners (Part 3) (Malay with instructions) — Thanks @ohtweet!
• RojakStory: Update Twitter status updated without GPRS charges (Malay with instructions) — by @cikamoi

If you blogged about us, do let us know so we can read and link you back. Thanks again everyone!

We are scheduling a maintenance on September 3, at 3 AM, lasting about 15 minutes.

This update enhances our Twitter message delivery functions. The gladlyCast website should continue to work.

The SMSes you sent us during which will be queued and delivered once our Twitter message delivery functions get activated again.

So once again, it’s Thursday morning 3 AM, 15 minutes.

Update 3:00 am: We’re performing some maintenance and have chosen not to go offline.
Update 3:05 am: Update completed. No problems encountered.

Thank you all for the retweets, the comments and the blog posts that you have made. We’re thrilled to read every little tweets you have made about us and we took note of each and every single one of them.

Today’s response is not without the help of these Malaysians:

• Twitterers: @kamal, @KLue, @nazroll, @icednyior, @williamonline and many other Twitterers
• Bloggers who posted about us here: Negaraku (@khairul), Life’s a Jigsaw Puzzle (@hathyiahusni), Nescagraff (@nescagraff), Felix Ker (@felixker) and The Ranting Cynic (@synical).

You guys have made our day. (:

If you blogged about us, do tell us about it. We like to read your opinion.

If you’re in Singapore, you may like to check out a Twitter and Plurk picnic coming August 29 at Botanic Gardens, Singapore. It’s potluck-styled so be sure to come with the nicest food and any forms of entertainment you can think of.

You can RSVP for the event here and check out who’s bringing what here. Last we checked, there are 35 attendees and no ants. So if you have yet to make plans coming Saturday, consider joining wonderful persons like jerricklim, simplyjean, yuhui, daphnemaia, uniquefrequency and victan. Have fun!

Sugianto also blogged about this event here.

[If you have any of this sort of social events (tweetups, plurkups etc), just tweet us @gladlyCast, we would love to spread the word for you.]

We are happy to announce that another local number has been added to our SMS-to-Twitter service — Malaysia.

Malaysians can now enjoy Twitter via text messages too by sending in tweets to a local number in Malaysia: +60 12 795 9876 (or 012-7959876, omitting country code).

To begin using gladlyCast, simply go to http://gladlycast.com, sign in with your existing Twitter account and associate your handphone.

Pudu Market (edited version)

To commemorate this, we have also updated our homepage image to the beautiful photograph taken by Goosmurf showing the colourful Pudu market in the busy city of Kuala Lumpur.

Salam sejahtera.

[LEon has also blogged about this here.]