It has been brought to my attention that the first NP update in over three years was unacceptably subtle. So, if you'd like to imagine a 21-gun salute, some fireworks and particularly regal fanfare...
There were some new doodles last week.
And presumably, once you've seen how frankly mediocre they are, you'll know why I didn't say anything last week.
Some of you will notice this site has changed in the last week. Now my tweets, photos and new NP doodles appear alongside the increasingly rare blog posts, the locations bit has been vastly improved and there's lots more music stuff, including an encyclopaedia of my music collection, and a list of upcoming gigs in Hampshire's pubs. Oh, and the poll is back and logins work again, so you can stop moaning at me now.
Most of the cool stuff relies on external content. The music database is all based around open linked data and the textual content comes mostly from Wikipedia. The gigs are screen-scraped from various bands' websites and Facebook, and the tweets on the main page obviously come from Twitter.
So yesterday, as we all know, Twitter went down for a few hours. We all know because the BBC started banging on about it, completely giving away where they get their news from these days :) I kinda passive-tweet, in that I tend to use apps rather than the website and only really check Twitter when I can be bothered. I certainly wouldn't notice if there had been no new tweets for a few hours. I did, however, notice that all the tweets had vanished from the front page of this website. It became apparent to me that my website now has many points of failure rather than just the server on which it's hosted, so I began to write a hotfix.
Now I believe you'll find you can always find my tweets here, even if Twitter is down. Every time the page is reloaded it pulls my new tweets from Twitter and stores them in a local database. If it can't get to Twitter, it simply reads the most recent local copy and seamlessly generates the page from that instead. This should be the case with Last.FM, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia, as well as the BBC's open data, all of which are used by this site to populate its content.
