Hope to see some good twitter donation campaigns coming up this holiday season.

There’s now a simple math problem on the front page. My apologies to all of the actual people that now have to fill in one more box!

1. We don’t take a cut. TweetDonate is free to use.
2. Donations don’t pass through TweetDonate. Donors click the link in Twitter and go directly to the PayPal pay page.
3. It’s easy. I don’t think it’s possible to have fewer steps than TweetDonate uses to get you started.
4. Donations can happen first. People can donate on Twitter to any user, then that user is prompted to sign up to complete the “money circuit”.

Looks like tweet-a-thons for Christmas parties are going to be popular in December. I’m looking forward to helping out as many people as possible with their twitter donations!

This should eliminate the spam accounts appearing in the tweetdonate timeline on Twitter.

X Innovate came and went – a spectacular conference. TweetDonate didn’t win, but I was a finalist and have a plaque to prove it. I modified TweetDonate to process requests for documentation help and won an award at the hackathon at the conference. Met some great people and had a blast.

Had some interesting discussions about selling TweetDonate but no buyers have yet appeared. In the meantime, some people have started using the service and it’s been running smoothly for a few months now. Earlier tonight Twitter made a change to how they assign IDs to tweets which caused a temporary problem. That seems to be fixed now, although it did break my uptime record of about three months (even if only for 20 minutes).

Looking forward to more people using it. I was notified of the Twitter ID bug by @AmandyAnderson who is running what looks like a great twitter-a-thon here: http://www.wildgoosecreative.com/Wild_Goose_Creative___Home.html

Premium accounts let you see statistics on donations, who’s been making donations (including Twitter details such as number of followers), where people are located who have viewed a donation link and change the way the donation page looks.

An interesting discovery of improved stats tracking is that I’ve discovered that there are many bots operating on the Twitter stream. Every link that is posted causes about eight or nine bots to visit the link within a minute or so.

User agent, host name, referrer, twitter followers and more will soon be available.

This is the PHP code I use to convert tweetdonate.org/2AD3 into a link stored in the database, update the click count for that link and then send the user’s browser to the right location:
$key = $_GET['key'];
$ID = (int)base_convert($key,36,10);
$result = mysql_query('SELECT url FROM ShortenedLinks WHERE ID = '.$ID.' LIMIT 1');
if(mysql_num_rows($result)>0){
$result = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
mysql_query('UPDATE ShortenedLinks SET click_count=click_count + 1 WHERE ID = '.$ID.' LIMIT 1');
header('Location:'.$result['url']);
}else
echo "This URL is no longer valid (if it ever was).";

How do you make the links? That’s even easier:
define('SHORTENED_URL_LINK_TEMPLATE','www.tweetdonate.org/%s');

function shortened_link_create($url){
if(mysql_query('INSERT INTO ShortenedLinks(url) VALUES(\''.$url.'\')'))
return sprintf(SHORTENED_URL_LINK_TEMPLATE,base_convert(mysql_insert_ID(),10,36));
return false;
}

This voting is for the people’s choice award. I really appreciate your support!

It’s a background that changes to show statistics about the service: http://twitter.com/tweetdonate

The background is updated by cron in fifteen minute increments by writing text over top of a preprepared PNG that has the logo and tag line. The image is then saved and uploaded to Twitter using the API. It’s actually pretty easy to make!

I recommend YQL for processing the Twitter feed because it’s ridiculously fast and can enormously cut down the amount of processing that you’ll have to do by filtering the results.
Here’s the YQL code that I’m using: USE 'http://www.datatables.org/twitter/twitter.search.xml' as twitter.search;SELECT text,from_user_id,id,from_user FROM twitter.search WHERE q='TweetDonate' AND rpp=100 AND since_id=x;

The since_id is where you put the ID that you saved earlier so that you don’t fetch the same tweets again. Depending on your application you might want to filter out a user. I’m filtering the tweetdonate user because I don’t want to reprocess my own status messages that are in response to other messages. I like returning JSON and json_decode’ing it in PHP. Instant search results using YQL.