If you can’t find yourself in Twitter Search..

I just came across a recent help page from Twitter (from June) about what to do if your tweets are not showing up in the twitter search. As it already says on the Selective Twitter Status help page, your tweets not showing in Twitter search is one of the most common reasons for the app not working for you, particularly if it used to work but suddenly stopped.

To check if your tweets are coming up in Twitter search go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in your twitter username. For example, my tweets should show up at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=andyy. If your tweets don’t appear, Twitter basically say to check Twitter isn’t having any problems at the moment, and if everything is otherwise fine (and your account is public, of course) then your tweets “have most likely been filtered out of our search index for quality reasons” which sadly isn’t much help (unless you really have been spamming, in which case you just gotta live with it.. ;)

As I mention on the help page, the last thing to try is to protect your Twitter account and then make it public again. You’ll need to post a new tweet after doing this to check if it worked.

New website..Tumblr it is

So, I finally got around to setting up a personal website that I’m not ashamed to show people..

I don’t really blog, but I wanted a home to stick links to my Twitter, FB, LinkedIn profiles etc for people that discover me online, collect links to show off when my projects receive press coverage etc as well as post interesting links and other notes from time to time.

Features I wanted:

  • Easy setup, hosted solution, no coding required - I’m lazy, didn’t want to spend time on the technical side of a full Wordpress install etc.
  • A service with lots of themes so I could find one I liked and do minimal customisations
  • The ability to post stuff with tags, so in future I can set up separate index pages for stuff related to GroupSpaces, Selective Twitter Status, entrepreneurship etc
  • My own domain name
  • Suitable cool post-from-email/iphone/etc support
  • All the above for free!

I looked at Posterous first but it doesn’t support all of the above right now. The winner is Tumblr which was quick to set up, does all the above plus the following bonus features:

  • Designed for minimal blogging (posting short snippets, links and videos rather than extended blog posts) that suits the way I want to post
  • Handy powerful iPhone app for posting
  • Supports Markdown - a handy way of entering formatting quickly as you type

I’ve also integrated commenting powered by Disqus, which took only a couple of minutes and has a bunch of powerful features (sign in with Facebook etc). I think the default Disqus interface confuses visitors with too many features and wordy instructions so I’ve hidden some parts of the comments interface and tweaked some other stuff out of the way using custom CSS.

Let’s see how it goes..

new FB iPhone app fixes Selective Twitter Status issue

The new 3.0 version of the Facebook iPhone app now displays all posts by Selective Twitter Status correctly, even if you have the “show follow link” option turned on in the settings :)

European Entrepreneurs Come to Life with their Latest Creations

Features an interview with David about GroupSpaces

Warwick Young Entrepreneurs Forum Talk on 98point2.com

Thanks to Sam Fianu for a write-up of the talk I gave at the Young Entrepreneurs Forum organised by Warwick Entrepreneurs this weekend.