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

My natural inclination leans towards Fight. 

I reach under my bed for my anti-burglar kit. First, I get my billy club. It's an 18-inch long, 1.5-inch thick dowel of hardened maple (Canadian, of course) with a strong elastic affixed to the base. 

I slip my left hand through the elastic and force it up to within a few inches of the other end. It takes effort. That elastic is strong!

Loosening my grip will shoot the billy club forward with great force. I've dented sheet metal with that thing. The billy is painted dark grey. It's hard to see in dim light.

A hunting knife with a razor-sharp 8-inch blade slips into my right hand. I hold it blade down, edge out. I press the blade's back firmly against my forearm. The business end can snap out from invisibility with a flick of the wrist.

A seeming missed punch delivers extreme consequence. 

Surprise is my friend. Let the burglar deal with the unexpected as best he can. Hey, I didn't ask the guy to break in. Tough luck for him.

Lest you think I'm some sort of wild man, let me assure you I am not. Over the years, I have had 3 burglaries while I was home. I also had 1 attempted home invasion.

They were all scary.

The first was scarier for me than the burglar. The rest got more than they bargained for. 

The way I figure it, if someone breaks in while the homeowners are home, they're ready for trouble. 

It's better to be equally ready. 

It's even better to be more ready.

I slip out of bed and pad slowly, softly, quietly through the dark house. Turning on lights is counter-productive. 

I'm familiar with this battle ground. He is not. That's to my advantage. It may be my only one. Turning on lights negates that advantage.

One eye is closed to protect against possible sudden bright light. Abdominals are flexed to protect against a sudden blow.

I'm listening more than looking. 

I hear nothing. 

I see nothing.

I complete my round. Nothing.

Now, I turn the lights on. There's no sign of a break-in attempt. The house is secure. 

So, what the Hell woke me up? Was it just a nightmare?

No, that would be a different kind of sudden wake-up.

That's when it hit me! It was a different kind of nightmare! 

It was Time-Zones!

The Subconscious is a Strange Place

I have beta testers on every continent except Australia. I don't have anything against Oz. Nobody from there volunteered is all. 

As it now stands, my testers are in 11 different time zones.

Many web apps solve the time zone issue by just working on UTC. That's server-talk for Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). So, if I want to schedule something at 10:00 I have to tell it to schedule at 15:00. 

That simplifies coding by transferring complexity to the user. That sucks. That's a coder's solution, not a marketer's. 

I'm both.

My App is written in PHP, working with mySQL, and a liberal sprinkling of JavaScript, Ajax, and Curl functions all served up with HTML5. CSS provides "hair and makeup." 

PHP has a way of changing the time zone of record on the fly.

We implemented it. We tested it. It works fine.

Gary Sharpe (GMT) schedules a 10:00 tweet as 10:00. Gloria Ochoa (GMT -7) also schedules a 10:00 tweet as 10:00.

The same script handles both cases.

So, what was my effing subconscious bitching about?

It hit me as I was crawling back into bed.

Scheduling the friggin tweets is only half the issue. They need to be tweeted at the time they were scheduled to tweet. (duhh!)

The server that does the actual tweeting runs on Montreal time (GMT -5).

Crap! 

I hate it when my subconscious is right nearly as much as I hate it when my wife is right.

In retrospect, this issue is obvious and really should have been addressed. Mea culpa.

In my defence, I'm adjusting existing, well-proven scripts for public consumption. Time-zones were never an issue. I was the only user. 

This issue only bubbled to the surface because we are going live (server-hot) on Monday, July 18th, 2016.

I got me some codin' to do.

While looking at the time zones I found something else. 

PHP has over 200 time zone codes. I thought that was waaay too many. I took the most populous cities in each time zone as representatives.

That works. But it has its drawbacks.

Minnesotan, Aaron Skogen's time zone was "AMERICA-Mexico City." That's accurate, (GMT -6). 

That's also...well...just weird. 

I added "AMERICA-Chicago" (also GMT -6) to the list and changed Aaron's profile. I'll probably have to add more going forward. No biggie.

Fixing the Other Time Zone Issue is NOT so Easy.

All I really need to do is adjust the tweet time before writing it to the database. Easily said.

Not so easily done, but not insurmountable either.

Let's take Gary's case. If he schedules a tweet at 10:00, the system just needs to write it as 05:00. Easy-peasy, right? Not really. 

What if he schedules at 04:00? If I just back the hour by 5 that makes it -01:00. Huh? It should be the <scheduled date> minus 1 day at 23:00.

It's not a major issue. I'll fix it in less than an hour. Then, I'll need a few more hours to test it. Coding is a great example of how the Butterfly Effect can bite the coder on the ass.

I like my ass as it is, thank you. Testing it is!!

The other thing is that the dashboard lists scheduled tweets. That means I have to convert back to the user's time zone before listing them. Same function but run backwards, no big deal.

Yup, I've got me some codin' to do.

While I'm at it I'll also implement an extra level of security. Twitter user-names are public. Twitter Id numbers aren't as public, but still fairly easy to get. We use both.

We already protect against brute-force and injection attacks. 

We already protect passwords with heavy encryption. Even I can't see them.

I'm adding one more security layer.

I'll implement a checksum function to block session cookie hijacking attacks. The checksum will be changed every day. It will be checked on every applicable page load. 

That means users will need to re-login every day (not every page load). "Remember me" browser scripts probably won't work.

Sorry, guys, but better safe than sorry.

UPDATE on upcoming functions

Gary Sharpe wrote about using RSS feeds for automation and cross-platform posting. I'll be honest and say I never considered RSS as anything more than an archaic, vestigial remnant of the early web. 

Still, when the Digital Sherpa speaks, I listen. 

I'm glad I did. I think you will be too.

Once the live Twitter connection is running smoothly, I will add RSS integration to the Web App. The scripts are written but not tested yet.

• You will be able to automatically schedule any number of tweets for any new addition to any RSS feed. That will handle the first day's promotion.
• You will also be able to import from any RSS feed for further scheduling inside your App. (We really need to come up with a name for this beast. I'm open to suggestions.)

The implications are far-reaching. 

• If you control multiple accounts, they can promote each other automatically. 
• You can use your own RSS feed (or any other one for that matter) to import posts right into the App. Those posts can come from anywhere. It can come from beBee, LinkedIn, your blog... anywhere.
• You can link to a friend's RSS feed for supportive retweets
• You can link to a favorite "influencer's" RSS feed and populate a controlled retweet program.
• You can link to your Company RSS feed.
• Most major platforms, including Facebook Instant Articles, support RSS posting/updating. They don't support future scheduling. We'll take care of that.

Contact Gary Sharpe if you want him to create your RSS feeds for you. 

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 have used 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.