A few years ago I wrote about a fractional horsepower web server.

Then in 2009, about fractional horsepower Twitters (which we're getting mighty close to now in 2011).

You can also see what we're working on as a fractional horsepower news network.

"Fractional horsepower" is a Steve Jobs idea, and it's a good one. Before he came out with his fractional horsepower computer, also known as the Apple II, computers were thought to be big things that few people could manage, and had limited applications. These days we carry more computing power in our pockets than the data center I learned how to program in had. But they still feel small and personal.

There aren't many things that can't benefit from being fractionalized.

Anyway, one of the big components of the system I'm working on is TwitterFeed, or something like it. It maps a feed onto a Twitter account. The problem is it takes up to 1/2 hour for it to recognize something new has published to my feed. That's okay for me, I really don't mind. But I don't imagine too many users buying into that. We simply had to get it faster.

Sigh.

That's the feeling I had this morning, when I decided to dust off my OAuth code and write my own bridge, one that would watch over a few hundred feeds, and provide instant connections using rssCloud.

Let me say this right now: OAuth is a bitch.

A nasty ugly ornery hellacious mean-spirited unfaithful, venge-filled, hate-filled Nazi bitch.

Another way of saying the same thing: OAuth has no honor.

Every time I pick it up it's broken, and I spend five hours wrestling it back into its box. And while I was doing it, reading the Twitter docs that say this is deprecated and that is depreciated -- etc. So I know in a few months all this shit is going to break too. This is why I wanted to let TwitterFeed worry about it. And I still would like to do that.

But for now, I've got a test server running, moving all my linkblog posts to my test account on Twitter. I'll tell you this, when I see how fast it is, I forget about how much time I've wasted coding OAuth.

 3/26/2011; 10:32:37 PM.   .