Twitter Pull

I've been using Twitter Pull for a while to provide a block with recent posts from my twitter feed. It's worked almost seamlessly, although a few times I've noticed that the block was empty. I took a few minutes today to track down what the problem was.

It turns out that that the error was making too many connections to twitter:

Could not retrieve data from Twitter. The error message received was: Rate limit exceeded. Clients may not make more than 150 requests per hour..This site may be subject to rate limiting. For more information, see:http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Rate-limiting

I'm not sure exactly what twitter is tracking -- perhaps the number of the connections from that particular dreamhost server. Supposedly the twitter_pull module is supposed to cache for 20 minutes. Even so, I could see failed requests associated with page loads. My blog isn't really all that popular, but looking at the logs, I realized that spam robots and infected machines are constantly trying to register, log in, and look at pages that don't exist. I had never created custom pages for reporting errors, so I did that and then configured the twitter_pull block to not appear on those pages. That should reduce the number of requests at least somewhat, so I've done my good deed for the day.