Updates on APEXBlogs

Some of you might have seen that APEXBlogs wasn't updated with twitter messages anymore for some time. Since last week blog posts were not taken anymore either.

I only found a little time today to look a bit closer into these issues and am happy to share with you what is going on.

The reason for not updating the blog posts was that my package produced this error:

ORA-31011: XML parsing failed
ORA-19202: Error occurred in XML processing
LPX-00217: invalid character 160 (U+00A0)
Error at line 1

Although the Oracle database is running in UTF-8 and Google is sending the posts as UTF-8, it looks like it's not doing that with the blog names. The name "João Oliveira" has some bad characters which Oracle didn't understand. After changing this name in Google Reader the procedure didn't produce the error anymore and Oracle could parse the xml again.

Concerning twitter... that is a different story. It looks like the APEXBlogs is banned to use the Twitter API. As I didn't take out the twitter api calls from the hourly sync, we stayed banned and it got worse I guess.

Although I thought I followed the guidelines of using the API, I'll change the syncing of twitter message to do it less frequently so we aren't blacklisted again in the future. The syncing worked for many months, so Twitter must have changed their policies.

Today I asked Twitter to remove APEXBlogs.info from the blacklist so hopefully the twitter syncing will work again in a few days.