Rate limiting

We’ve posted more than 3k messages for a single user in the past few days. More than all other users combined, across Composer’s entire history! We reached out to this user, asking about their usage, and we’re still waiting for a response.

To keep things in check, we’ve introduced a rate limit. So you can only post a set number of messages per day. We’ve chosen a number that means every current user should be fine. If you do see any rate limit errors, please let us know and we’ll increase your limit.

If you’re interested in using Composer for very high volume social media message distribution, please get in touch.

A new bookmarklet

There’s now a bookmarklet that sends the url of the page to the link shortener, instead of the post body. There’s a brand new bookmarklets page containing all the latest info, and the bookmarklet has gone from the compose screen. Cleaner, neater, nicer.

Thanks to Tim for the suggestion.

Composer supports scheduling

We’ve just deployed the ability to schedule posts. You’ll see a new “Post later” option on the compose screen. If you click it, you’ll get an option to choose the time and date when your message should be delivered.

This feature is brand new, this is the first draft, and it’s still in alpha. It’s best to only schedule posts for a month or so in advance. Further into the future should work, but a month is the safest window. Posts should be delivered within a minute of your specified time, but they could take up to 5 minutes under some circumstances.

We’ll work on making the interface prettier and easier to use, adding a calendar to choose the date, and so on. For now, it should get the job done. If you experience any issues or have any feedback at all, please let us know in the comments.

Twitter and their “shortener”

tl;dr Composer just got better at posting tweets, so post full urls instead of shortening.

Twitter automatically parse out any domain name or url in a tweet and replaces it with a t.co link. If you type something like twitter.com your 11 character domain gets converted into (currently) a 22 character t.co link.

Until today, Composer wasn’t very good at understanding this. Sometimes, it would shorten your post before sending it to twitter when it wasn’t necessary. And worse, with the introduction of images, sometimes posts to twitter would fail. If you add an image, you lose (currently) 23 characters from your tweet because twitter posts a link to the image (22) plus a space (1).

So, from today, we’ve built custom handlers just for twitter. We parse out any domain or url, replace it with (currently) 23 characters, and then check if your tweet is <140.

Shortlinking

This means, if you post a massive url to twitter, it gets auto shortened on twitter’s side, and now Composer is smart enough to figure that out. So if you’re posting links to Facebook, Twitter and WordPress, post the full url, no need to use a shortener.

Two caveats, we’re a little conservative because twitter’s t.co links are 22 characters for http links and 23 for https links. So we assume all links are 23 just to be on the safe side. Also, we parse out all domains (like composer.io or github.io) which Twitter doesn’t. I filed a bug.

This was made substantially easier thanks to twitter-text-php, thanks to its authors.

We Just Added Service Groups

Excited to announce, hot on the heels of adding image support, we’ve now also added service groups!

Service groups allow you to create groups of services that you frequently post to, and then select a whole group of services at once, rather than having to choose each one individually.

This is really useful if you have a lot of services, or manage multiple ‘personas’.

Managing Your Groups

Login to Composer and go to Account>Service Groups

If you’ve not created a group before, your first step will be to choose which services you’d like selected as default. This will create a group called ‘Default’ and will be your default services chosen on the Compose page.

Once you’ve selected those, you can then create as many groups as you want. Groups display right above the list of services on the Compose page, so when you select a group, you’ll be able to see exactly which services your message will get posted to.

Composer posts images

In our biggest release since launch, we’ve just deployed the ability to publish images.

Today, images are posted to Facebook, Twitter and WordPress. If you send an image post to other services, we’ll send just the text, without the image. We’re working on sending a link to the image to other services.

We send the image as a normal image post to both Facebook and Twitter. For WordPress, we get a bit creative. First, we upload the full original file to your WordPress site. Then, we get the image details back from WordPress, and insert the medium sized image into the post. This way, you can choose what size your Composer posted images appear in WordPress, by editing your “medium size” in your Media settings on your WordPress site.

To celebrate, I posted this picture of our office elephant to Facebook, Twitter and WordPress!

Office Elephant

Changing Your Facebook Password Breaks Posting

Thanks to some helpful tips from one of our awesome users, I found out this morning that if you change your Facebook password, it breaks posting on Composer. IE when you try and post to Facebook after changing your Facebook password, you get a ‘failed’ message.

To resolve this, you need to delete the Facebook service and then re-add it.

I find this slightly peculiar for Facebook to work in this way. When I changed my password, I did have the option to ‘Sign out of all devices’, but in my mind, this shouldn’t affect apps which integrate with Facebook.

I also tested posting to Facebook from Hootsuite right after the password change, and it also failed, so it appears to be an issue with the way they authorise apps, rather than a problem specific to Composer.

I also tested changing my Twitter password, and can confirm that there were no issues. However, they had a nice feature where after changing my password they said “There are 9 apps which currently have access to your Twitter account, check them out here” with a link to view the apps which have access.

For me, this is a much better way of managing the password change process.