Twitter updates crash my blogs

I haven’t found sufficient reason to listen to my inner sceptisism about the awful writer’s bolemia website, widely known as Twitter. I’m ridiculously proud of my forty-something followers, some of whom are not even real people (I’m referring to websites and places of work, I’m not making a jibe at my own followers- goodness gracious do you think I’m MAD?), and I like having my Twitter updates appearing on my blogs. Its very fashionable in the blogging world- a little blog inside your blog. Like Russian dolls, except if the smallest doll breaks, the bigger one is screwed too.

I’ve seen a dip in traffic today, probably because of the massive denial of service attack on Twitter today, causing the Twitter link to timeout, making my blog look like its crashing too. Admittedly, my own server would likely collapse like a tower of jamjars should any hacker target it, but I’m really starting to wonder whether its a good idea to have Twitter on my homepage. I never visit someone’s blog and read their Twitter updates, let alone follow them- that’s most likely to happen while reading Twitter itself.

Yet I find myself reluctant to change the situation. In all truth, I think Twitter is rubbish, but I’m hooked in an unpleasantly high degree.

Anyone had any good workarounds for embedding Twitter in their blogs and avoiding such problems? I’ve stuck my Twitter javascript code at the bottom of the HTML near the </body> tag; would it be better to pull-in the RSS of my tweets within my Rails view?

This entry was posted on August 7, 2009 at August 7, 2009 and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.