Archive for the ‘gladlyCast’ Category

Got more than one Twitter account?

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

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.

Singapore SMSes were delivered late

Monday, September 7th, 2009

The Singapore SMS device was malfunctioned this morning. We did not get notified until @chrissyypoo alerted us. Sorry for the delayed messages, we have successfully delivered all delayed messages from Singapore.

We are currently investigating what went wrong and update you guys on what actually occurred.

The Singapore SMS feature is up and will be monitored closely.

Update: A glitch occurred on the software that checks the SMS device and it stops checking for new messages until we restarted it.

We now support DM via SMS

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

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.

How to use SMS to update Twitter in Malaysia

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

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:

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

Scheduled maintenance 03-Sep-2009 @ 3 AM

Monday, August 31st, 2009

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.

Facebook page for gladlyCast

Friday, August 28th, 2009

We have just created a Facebook page for gladlyCast! We’re still learning how to use Facebook pages effectively. Do scribble your opinion or questions on our wall.

You can also become a fan here to be get updates on us through Facebook:

gladlyCast on Facebook

And thank you to @paperfeet for suggesting we have a Facebook page. :)

Thank you Malaysia for the wonderful support

Friday, August 28th, 2009

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:

You guys have made our day. (:

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

gladlyCast now supports Malaysia

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

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)

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.]

LEon reviews on gladlyCast

Friday, August 14th, 2009

LEon, of LEongraphy, has written a review review on gladlyCast’s SMS-to-Twitter feature and included our screenshots too! Read more at his blog:

How does it work?

You send a sms to a local number and it would recognize the subscriber’s mobile number and matches that SMS to a specific twitter account.

He’s also made us an illustration for use for our homepage:

gladlyCast illustration by LEon

gladlyCast illustration by LEon

Thanks LEon, we really appreciate it. It’s the first review coming in and certainly made our day. :)

Like to give gladlyCast a try? There is no signing up involved. Click here.

Better reliability for gladlyCast

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Despite the fact that we already have multiple queueing and caching systems running for gladlyCast, the last few days we have also seen gladlyCast went down for a few minutes a few times.

Well, that has taught us one thing:
Queuing and caching systems are only good for ensuring minimum or zero lost of tweets (all your text messages are always accounted for), it, however, doesn’t help in ensuring minimum system downtime.

For that, we have just written an extensive monitoring daemon, almost similar to that of Apache HTTP Server, to ensure that gladlyCast is up most of the time.

Sorry for the pretty technical post. We promise we will not do this often. If you do not get it, fret not, it simply just means we have just greatly increased the reliability of gladlyCast.

By the way, do stay tuned. We have some announcements to be made very soon.

 

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