Any updates on this issue??

Not seeing the source of twitter-background.php I can't really confirm anything about
what's not working correctly. This is what I think is going on:

1. Use the API to update the background image
  » Question: What URL do you use for this update?

2. Visit the web site and there is no background
  » Question: Do you see an old image? A blank background? If blank, what color?

3. Visit the 'Design' tab and click 'Save' (no other input)

4. New image appears


Is that correct? If so, can you asnwer the questions inline? It would help me find
out what the issues is and where it might be broken.

Question: What URL do you use for this update?

http://www.maverickwebcreations.com/twitter/twitter-background.php

It grabs a random image from the
http://www.maverickwebcreations.com/twitter/images/backgrounds/ folder and uploads it
to Twitter.

Question: Do you see an old image? A blank background? If blank, what color?

I do not see any background image. Right now, I only see a light grey background
colour at my Twitter profile, which is incorrect.

This is the problem... If I go to Settings -> Design and click on "Save Changes". The
background image appears.

Here is how you can recreate this bug:

Run this URL:

http://www.maverickwebcreations.com/twitter/twitter-background.php

Take note of the file name displayed on the screen.

Go to my Twitter profile:

http://twitter.com/mwcreations

Notice there is not background image but a light grey background colour.

Check out the current Twitter background image:

http://twitter.com/users/show/id.xml?screen_name=mwcreations

The background image file is not the same as the one displayed from my script.

Please note that after you run my script, go to my Twitter profile and refresh it
repeatedly. I estimate it takes about 4 hours or more before the background image
appears. Maybe there is a cache or something. If I want it to be instant, I need to
click on the "Save Changes" button in "Settings" -> "Design".

Check out the screen video I made of this issue.

http://www.maverickwebcreations.com/2009/04/15/twitter-api-background-image-updating-bug.html

When asking for the URL I meant what API URL, for example:

http://twitter.com/account/update_profile_image.json

That way I know where to look for the error. The screen cast matches my understanding
of the issue and I'll work on a fix once I have a starting point. The note that it
does show up after 4 hours or so is very helpful.

I am using this API URL:

http://twitter.com/account/update_profile_background_image.xml

 Issue 473  has been merged into this issue.

What's the latest update on this issue?

I am working on this and a few other medium priority issues today and tomorrow.
Hopefully that will go well and fixes will be deployed before the end of the week.

That's great news, thank you for the update

(No comment was entered for this change.)

Any update on this? :)

I am also experiencing this problem. An update/solution would be greatly appreciated :)

Any updates on this? We're seeing the same thing and would be more than happy to 
provide any information that might be helpful for resolving this issue.

Click on the star next to the title to get emailed when this issue is updated.

Still no update pushed for this one for a month...
I'd have thought defects in the API would be fairly important to Twitters tech team...

What I nice reminder, thanks. I am working with a few different people to sort this out but it is not a trivial as 
everyone seems to think. Trust me, I'm working on it. It's not my highest priority but I am continuing to make 
progress.

(No comment was entered for this change.)

Can we have an ETA on this? We have projects in the pipeline that are depending on
this feature. 

- Chad Scira

Likewise, an ETA would be great. It seems the priority was lowered but we are waiting
to fully market our app until the system works 100%. Already we are having thousands
of users try to use our twitter background system and about 1 in 3 doesn't work.
Getting lots of confused users.

I completely understand you guys are working on it, which we are super thankful for!
Just hoping we can make some slight planning for our marketing. Thanks again!

I would suggest avoiding this API feature at all costs, If its non-functional i think
you guys should put a notice in the actual API Doc... 

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-account%C2%A0update_profile_background_image

this gives the false impression that the api request actually works as advertised. A
simple "this feature is currently not stable" message would save people hours of
frustration.

:)

- Chad Scira

I am being affected by this issue as well. I know you guys have TONS to do, but an
ETA would be great for us :)

Met with the person who most recently worked on the image upload code and got some ore information. 
Working on a fix based on that feedback and testing.

Fantastic news, thanks!

wonderful :)

Finished a test script to re-create the issue in our staging environment. Disproved the current working theory 
and spent a few hours trying different possible fixes. I now have a hacked-up version of our code doing the 
right thing. Working on making that more usable so it can be deployed.

Just had a strange thing happen with uploading on the site. In case it's relevant to 
your work with the API/caching, I'll describe it here. I've used the API several 
times yesterday afternoon to attempt to change my background without any success. The 
CSS background image always referred to an image on Amazon S3 that didn't exist. By 
the end of the day, I uploaded an image via the site and my background still didn't 
change. Here's the neat part. This morning when I came into the office and uploaded 
another image through the site, my background changed to one of the many images I had 
uploaded via the API yesterday. I waited about 20 minutes and uploaded another image, 
and a completely different image I had uploaded using the API showed up! Pretty 
strange, thought you might like to know. Feel free to contact me if you need more 
details. 

This is GREAT news! Looking forward to this being wrapped up!

Fix deployed. Verified with http://www.maverickwebcreations.com/twitter/twitter-background.php and http://twitter.com/mwcreations

We're still seeing inconsistent results using the API for background uploads. Please 
contact me directly if you would like the details of our implementation. 

I'm getting 500 error code back when I try with the API, and broken images when I use 
the web interface

matt.parrett: it is possible the change has not propagated to all servers yet.

 cts3e1: it is possible the change has not propagated to all servers yet but a 500 is unexpected. When you say 
'broken images when I use the web interface', so you mean when you upload via the web interface, or view the 
page of the user you get the 500 for? Either way having a copy of the image and the user name could provide 
me some clues.

it makes sense that propagation just hasn't gone through yet.  

by web interface I meant going to settings > picture and uploading a new image, but 
that's working now.  consider me impatient

has anyone been able to upload background images successfully with any degree of
consistency since the update yesterday?

Still no. It seemed a to be working fine a couple hours ago, but now its showing the
same inconsistencies I was seeing days ago.

Hoping its just a propagating issue... 

Actually, now its not working AT ALL through API or manually. Hopefully this means a
fix is going through the works

I'm also unable to set the image tiling via tile=false or tile=true. Images are
always tiled when changing the background image.

The propagation to servers should only have taken an hour at the most. Some of these problems could be related to 
the unplanned downtime [1] but that 7 minutes can only account for so many people updating this ticket. We are also 
in the process of deploying some more code so there could be some oddities while that is ongoing but there should 
be very few hiccups.

I am unable to reproduce the issue using the URLs in the original report. If you are still having problems please post 
the request/response headers, steps to reproduce, or a public URL like the original requester. If I cannot reproduce 
the issue I can't fix it.

http://status.twitter.com/post/107824532/unplanned-downtime

It looks like Amazon S3 may be having trouble at the moment. We're looking into it. We store profile images 
there so if S3 is down or inaccessible uploads will fail via the API and the web.

Using curl -v you can see the request and response headers. I've pasted mine below
and the command I used to obtain them. Replace the username, password, and image path
with valid information before running from a command line. I've attached a text file
with this same information in case it somehow gets mangled here. If you don't have
access to a command line, you can see the inconsistencies by using
twitterbackgrounds.com to post a background. My hope is that someone smarter than me
will point out that Twitter is just fine and my method is failing for some reason I
haven't noticed. 

curl -v -i -H "Expect:" --basic -u "username:password" -F
"image=@/path/to/an/image.jpg;filename=whatever.jpg;content-type:image/jpeg" -F
"tile=false" http://twitter.com/account/update_profile_background_image.xml

Request headers:

> POST /account/update_profile_background_image.xml HTTP/1.1
> Authorization: Basic [removed]==
> User-Agent: curl/7.15.5 (i686-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.15.5 OpenSSL/0.9.8b
zlib/1.2.3 libidn/0.6.5
> Host: twitter.com
> Accept: */*
> Content-Length: 135947
> Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----------------------------811bcf81d391
>

Response headers:

< Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 22:56:53 GMT
< Server: hi
< Last-Modified: Thu, 14 May 2009 22:56:53 GMT
< Status: 200 OK
< ETag: "1cb03712ebf881186c7fc8c407a22b2b"
< Pragma: no-cache
< Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0
< Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8
< Content-Length: 1645
< Expires: Tue, 31 Mar 1981 05:00:00 GMT
< X-Revision: e8cdf86372da838f4cb112e826cddcd374bcee16
< X-Transaction: 1242341813-60326-27401
< Set-Cookie: lang=; path=/
< Set-Cookie:
_twitter_sess=BAh7CToJdXNlcmkE7GpfAjoTcGFzc3dvcmRfdG9rZW4iLWMwNjc0ODI1MmY4%250AYTI4YTViOTdmYTBlOTFhYTY0OThlMjJkYjNiZGY6B2lkIiVjNWEyZDdkYTFk%250ANGM0MWUzNDJjN2UzOWQyNzQ4OGY0NCIKZmxhc2hJQzonQWN0aW9uQ29udHJv%250AbGxlcjo6Rmxhc2g6OkZsYXNoSGFzaHsABjoKQHVzZWR7AA%253D%253D--15dcd4ee3d14d281359a31b7e2b87aa5a0b780cd;
domain=.twitter.com; path=/
< Vary: Accept-Encoding
< Connection: close

	451.txt
	1.7 KB Download

Here's a cute one-liner that quickly grabs the background image filename on a Twitter
profile.

curl -q http://twitter.com/some_twitter_profile 2>/dev/null | grep 'background: ' |
head -n 1 | sed 's/.*(\(.*\)).*/\1/' | rev | cut -f 1 -d '/' | revC

I'm assuming that the issue is related to amazon S3. If you try and manually upload a
background it gives the response of "There was a problem with your picture. Was it an
animated gif? We don't support those!" when the photos are valid jpegs

We've been using Amazon S3 extensively for several months on several extremely busy
web apps. I've never had any weird problems like this.

Hi,

I'm the owner of www.TwitterBackgrounds.com, and we have been working with this
problem for several weeks. Obviously this bug has now been labeled as "fixed" and
"closed," so I worry no one is seeing this message. Perhaps the current bugs that
still exist are slightly different, but the problem that most of us are having is
still quite prevalent. 

From our perspective here is the problem:

When a user uses our tool to post a new background (along with a new
matching color scheme) it seems to work half the time. The other half the
time the API seems to immediately delete the old image from Amazon S3
(good) but yet the HTML still calls that image. It doesn't update the CSS
with the new information but yet deletes their old information. Normally
the color scheme will always show up. Perhaps there is a caching problem of
the user's CSS / Background image information.

To help you better understand and see the problem I've provided three
helpful examples.

First, I've attached a file with our code. Perhaps it is our faulty
programming (although many other developers have expressed their
frustrations too). You can verify that we are using the API correctly to
ensure that the problem is not on our end.

Second, is a link to our website: http://www.twitterbackgrounds.com. You
can use our API tool by trying to install any one of the free backgrounds
on Twitter. Again, if it works the first time, try it again. It seems to
fail about half the time.

Third, is a link to a Twitter search of TwitterBackgrounds.com:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=twitterbackgrounds.com
That shows the most recent people who have used our site. If you go through
the first page you will see that half of the users’ profiles are broken.
This should give you an endless amount of examples to help verify.

Thanks for taking a look at this problem. We have several thousand users a
day trying to use this and we have several hundred a day that voice their
wishes for it to work consistently. We recently received a very kind
shoutout from @mashable (Pete Cashmore) and we were very sad that our site
couldn't work for those thousands of users.

Any help that we can provide, please let us know. Our team runs the largest
resource for MySpace Layouts as well, so we have worked with Amazon S3 on a
massive, hundreds of millions of daily calls basis. We have been working
round the clock to try and fix it on our end and are now at a point where we simply
have to wait for a fix. We greatly appreciate your work on this matter.

Hopefully the links to our tools and the users' profiles will help you replicate the
problem. Thanks again for working on this issue.

	background-api.txt
	1.7 KB Download

So is background image now changed immediately with REST API? If yes - can anybody
help me with what piece of code?

I am PHP cURL but background image does not change and I get error as "Something has
gone wrong".

Any help will be highly appreciated.

- Jay

I get the same error. When I run my PHP code, Twitter says Something has gone wrong". 
Here's my code:
$curl_handle = curl_init();
$img = "sunset.jpg";
$args = array(@$img);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $args);
// Set up the twitter API address
$url = 'http://twitter.com/account/update_profile_background_image.xml';
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
//curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_NOBODY, 0);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);

$header = array("Expect:");
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header); 

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "iambhargava:iaminsane");
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);

Can somebody please tell me what's wrong with it?