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Archive for the ‘gladlyCast’ Category

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.

Tags: direct message, dm, sms, twitter
Posted in gladlyCast | 2 Comments »

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:

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!

Tags: appreciation, blogging, cheap, how to, malaysia, sms, twitter
Posted in gladlyCast | 11 Comments »

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.

Tags: daemon, delivery, maintenance, twitter
Posted in gladlyCast | 2 Comments »

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. :)

Tags: facebook, fan, page
Posted in gladlyCast | 2 Comments »

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:

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.

Tags: appreciation, blogging, malaysia, sms, support, twitter
Posted in gladlyCast | 5 Comments »

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)

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.]

Tags: handphone, malaysia, mobile phone, pudu market, sms, twitter
Posted in gladlyCast | 4 Comments »

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

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.

Tags: review, screenshot, twitter
Posted in gladlyCast | 1 Comment »

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.

Tags: monitoring, reliability, technical
Posted in gladlyCast | No Comments »

gladlyCast downtime for 5 minutes

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Our Twitter service is resting for 5 min as we patch an error. SMSes will be queued and delayed for 5 min pending this emergency update.

Update: It’s back up.

(What actually happened is that Twitter threw us an unexpected error and gladlyCast didn’t know how to react so it went into sleep mode till we addressed this issue.)

Tags: downtime, emergency
Posted in gladlyCast | No Comments »

gladlyCast server is back up

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

We are pleased to announce that we removed the major bottleneck that slowed down gladlyCast’s Twitter status update delivery. The system is now well again, but not without feeding it with some vegetables:

Did we miss any of your SMSes during the upgrade?
Do tweet us about it. By informing us for these fault, you help us become more reliable for you. :)

Tags: scalability, server, twitter, upgrade, vegetable, vertical scaling
Posted in gladlyCast | No Comments »