Grandpa Ham – Grandpa Can do IT!

• Success Tweeting Headlines from IPAWS-OPEN Alerts. Follow @dmopenstate if you want to be spammed during the upcoming demos. #

Interesting phenomena.  I put out a tweet likening the NIEM Naming and Design Rules Document to a cross between Leviticus and IRS regulations.  Almost immediately, I was followed by 1) a Bible Study Group asking for money 2) a NIEM consultant, and 3) a Tax Consultant.  Apparently they each have some sort of bot in place that looks for key words. They then follow in tthe hope of being followed.  It worked for the NIEM consultant, not the others. Shortly thereafter, I was folowed by ithe IJIS Institute, a justice related non-profit with a strong interest in NIEM.  I now follow them as well.

It is always nice to know that you web services are up and running strong.  Since Twitter is the current rage, I though I would see if it could actually be useful. I set up a new Twitter account, wrote a poller to DM-OPEN that pings it on a regular basis and sends me a direct message to my grandpaham Twitter account upon the first instance of a successful ping,  the first instance of a failure following a series of successful pings, and the first instance of a successful ping after one or more failures.  Failures do not happen often, but now I will be the first to know if they do. Cool.