Hi cck_,
Sorry you are having problems using the plugin. This means that your WordPress site does not manage to fetch the expected response from the API which handles fetching Tweets.
Where is your website hosted? It is on a company/educational network? The most common cause of this issue would be corporate firewalls, etc, blocking the requests.
Thread Starter
cck_
(@cck_)
Hi Peter,
Thnx for your response. The website is hosted by hosting2go.nl – an regular hostingcompany. I don’t have issues with API’s from other plugins.
gr, Calvin
Hi cck_,
I have been checking the server logs and I can see no trace of connections refused/blocked (other than to odd ports, obviously not proper traffic).
I had to change the infrastructure behind the API around the time it stopped working for you, which resulted in the IP address changing to 23.239.13.127
The plugin uses the WordPress functions to make the HTTP request to the API, so that part should not be an issue.
It is possible that the change in IP address has caused problems, it might be worth asking your web host why your site is failing to connect to the API. They may be able to give you a more detailed description of what the problem is (as they have more access).
I am sorry you have had these problems and if I can identify anything I can do to resolve it I will straight away.
I just turned on WP_DEBUG and when I go to Settings->Kebo Twitter Feed I see the same error at the top right of the screen:
API Status
23.239.13.127 Error
Your site cannot connect to the Kebo API, this will prevent the plugin from functioning as expected. You are welcome to ask for help on the support forum.
Since I get the spinner before the error msg is generated, it looks like the connection timed out. The plugin has worked ok previously though.
I tried again – same error, then a 3rd time and it worked ok. I wonder if your connection is getting overloaded, or it could be at our end too.
API Status
23.239.13.127 Success
Hi poddys,
The API Status box should display whether or not WP_DEBUG is turned on. Are you having problems with the plugin which caused you to turn on WP_DEBUG? e.g. Not showing Tweets, etc?
I have just tried reproducing this intermittent API Status error but my test sites all get success each time.
The API servers are currently only serving around 20 requests/second, which is lower than normal (which in itself might indicate an issue), so doesn’t appear to be overloaded.
I will monitor the API closely this afternoon.
Thanks Peter, rapid response too 🙂
The feed appears to come in ok, but when I click on the Settings link for the plugin in WP Admin I seem to randomly get a Success or Error on connecting. Not sure if it is our problem, but I see nothing in the PHP or Apache logs.
Hi poddys,
It is possible it is an error in the API Status process, rather than not correctly connecting to our API.
It works by creating a Javascript AJAX requests from your browser, which prompts your WP install to make an HTTP request to a test URL on our API. Depending on the response it will respond to the AJAX request with success/failure.
It might be that the browser portion of this is breaking down, due to a WIFI connection, or other variables. It could actually be an issue with the API too, it is difficult to pinpoint the cause of issues like this.
If the plugin has a problem connecting to our API (or we get an error from Twitter) it is logged and displayed at the bottom of the plugin settings page (only visible if there have been errors). So if you cannot see a table of errors at the bottom of the settings page and the feed appears to be working, I wouldn’t worry about it.
I will make a note to look at the API Status box and make the failure message more relevant, by differentiating between failure to connect to our API and failure to make a proper AJAX request.
The Twitter API Log does show these for today:
13:16:05 – April 16, 2014 1 name lookup timed out
13:13:07 – April 16, 2014 1 Connection time-out
and similar for previous days.
The feed does seem to work though, and we have it set to refresh every 15 minutes, which I assume is optimum since we don’t have a huge number of tweets.
But this “I believe” is all related to connecting to Twitter, not to your server right?
Hi poddys,
Ah, that is interesting.
When the errors are logged we store the error code returned from Twitter, unless it was an internal WP HTTP API error, in which case we assign the value 1 (which you can see in your log).
This tells us that WordPress could not make a successful connection to our API. Both cases of ‘name lookup timed out’ and ‘Connection time-out’ could be related to our API or could be related to issues on your server/host.
The plugin should continue to use cached data until it manages to fetch fresh tweet data, to avoid intermittent issues like this, so you should never have the public side of your site effected by this.
I will keep an eye on the API and if anyone else is having similar issues please let me know.
Thanks Peter.
I know we have had a few problems setting up the server correctly. This is an in-house site running on IBM iSeries with Zend Server, and WordPress was running painfully slow. A number of tweaks later and installing Hyper-Cache and things are looking a lot better.
This morning I turned the WP-Cron off and added our own Cron job which runs every 30 minutes, calling WP_cron.php. I’m not sure if turning WP-cron off is relevant to this, but only runnign it every 30 minutes might mean we only connect to Twitter every 30 minutes, in which case I will change the frequency.
Hopefully if it is a configuration error at our end we can figure it out soon.
Just been looking at your portfolio of plugins and will recommend our news site designer to take a look. Speed, functionality and ease of use are all important, sounds like you have the right philosophy.
Best Regards
Tony
Hi Tony,
Hosting can certainly be a can of worms sometimes. It sounds like it is probably not something you will need to worry about.
The plugin isn’t tied/connected to the WP Cron API in any way, so that shouldn’t affect it. The plugin uses the Transient API and stores an expiry time inside the transient to give it soft a soft expiry (to avoid being stuck with no data).
Thank you for the kind words and support. I hope that over the next few months Kebo Social will turn into something very special and far surpass the success of Kebo Twitter Feed. It still has a huge amount of work left before it is ready for the spotlight though, so I should get back to work!
Good luck with your site and if you have any more problems or the connection issue with our API gets worse, let me know!
Thanks Peter. Good Luck too.
