Fun, Games, and Caffeine in Start-Up Land: Hello World!

It wasn't a very long labour as these things go. It wasn't without "issues." No worries, I expected some. At least, it was ahead of schedule.

In this series, I promised to take you through both the peaks and the valleys we face in my latest start-up.

You can tell a lot from the first moments of a baby's life. 

My son looked more annoyed than angry at birth. No caterwauling cries from him. He grew into a steady, serious man with a quirky sense of humor. FYI, today is his 28th birthday.

My daughter came into the world amidst screaming and crying loud enough to wake the dead. She remains so to this day. She too has a quirky sense of humor. Her wedding is this weekend. She made me a button that reads, "Father of the Bride-zilla."

Flipping the switch was anti-climactic. It seemed that nothing was happening. It looks like the Web App will be more like Peter than Katrina.

The Web App's main raison d'être is to schedule Tweets. It does so in 10 different ways so far. More functions are on the horizon. Nothing was scheduled to tweet at the moment it went server-hot. So, it did just that, nothing.

That's a good thing.

I saw a scheduled tweet was coming up. I waited. Once the time passed, I called up the log for automated tweets. I was eager to see the first successful tweet!

For the non-techies, HTML, the language of the Web, returns codes to tell your browser what happened when it tried to do what you asked. The App logs those. 

Most of us know Code 404 - Resource Not Found. That's the one you get when the link you try to load doesn't exist.

So if you try to go to https://www.bebee.com/producer/@paul-croubalian/Why-beBee-is-BETTER-than-Great-Sex-with-Someone-You-Love , that's what you'll get. 

Much as I love beBee, much as I think it's great,... it's NOT better than sex with someone you love!

What I was hoping for was a Code 200 - Success. I wondered if I would get Code 401 - Unauthorized Access or even Code 403 - Forbidden.

I had a plan in place to deal with either of those "bad" results.

What I got was Code 0.

Huh? There ain't no such thing. 

The function that posts tweets wasn't actually doing anything. The server found the function. If it hadn't the script would have crashed. Besides, the script managed to write the log entry.

Frantic code reviews found no errors. We were still getting a code 0. I replaced the script file on the server with my back-up.

Tadahh!

Funny how we always assume we made a mistake. Sometimes, it isn't us. The file holding the script was corrupted during upload. Why it sort-of worked is a mystery.

That was it for the drama.

It went smoother than I expected. It went smoother than experience tells me I should expect.

Why does that worry me?

On the Plus side

I took a page from the Javier and Juan Playbook. I'm actually listening to users. 

Imagine that!

Gary Sharpe wrote about how RSS feeds could make our lives easier. To be honest, I never really considered them. 

Gary is the Digital Sherpa. He's rarely wrong about these things.

The more I dug into what they are capable of, the more convinced I became that I had to add that functionality. 

RSS functions are on the way. Users will be able to:

• Automatically promote new additions to an RSS feed.
• Automatically import new posts into the App for further scheduling.
• Promote/schedule other users' posts via those users' RSS feeds.
• (Possibly) Apply a pre-established promotion schedule to every new post without doing anything more than just writing the darned thing in the first place.

Using an RSS feed to populate the App will still allow users to use hashtag rotation to automate other platforms. They will still be able to use any of the scheduling methods.

If you want your very own RSS feed, reach out to Gary.

Multiple Account Management

Gloria Ochoa manages three Twitter accounts. She wants to be able to manage them all from one log-in. 

Duhh! Why didn't I think of that? That should be ready within the next few days. I will limit it to 50 linked accounts. That should be enough for anybody. If not, I can always change the way we do it to make linked accounts unlimited. 

Old-School Retweets

Guy Chevalier doesn't like the way retweets work on Twitter. 

Neither do I. 

Every tweet has it's own id number. A retweet just refers to that id number. That means images are lost, text is cropped, and, sometimes, links are iffy. 

You need to actually click on the retweet to see anything.

We've already established that tweets without images are not worth much.

The Old-School method is sometimes called a Manual Retweet. It isn't a retweet at all. It's a new tweet that starts with "RT." It mentions the original tweep. It uses the same image and link.

Manual Retweets are far more effective. 

We have all the data from when the original tweet was created. It's easy enough to rebuild it as a Manual Retweet.

Good idea, Guy.

Manual Retweets are on the To Do list. Look for them after multi-account management.

We still need to name this thing

I'm open to suggestions. Go ahead and suggest "Appy McAppface" if you like. 

Now, I'm off to look into why a user is facing problems scheduling some tweets but not others.

In this series, I chronicle the joys and pitfalls I face in my latest start-up. At least, I hope there will be some joys along the path.

The as yet unnamed startup is a public implementation of the Twitter/Cross-Platform Management and Scheduling system that I use with great succes for myself and clients under writing contract. In some ways, this one will be even more powerful. If you like, you can join the beta testers here. 

• Fun, Games, and Caffeine in Start-Up Land
• Fun, Games, and Caffeine in Start-Up Land, Part Deux