Help/FAQs

Why are your SALTs, images instead of text?

In this age of hacking, many site owners have attempted to protect themselves by limiting
what their users can do.  MySpace and Facebook are extremely aggressive in limiting the scripting that their users are allowed to use.  These measures are for your protection, as well as theirs.

Images are safe.  Hackers can't steal your passwords or bank account with an image, so they are allowed by everybody.  Similarly, a link to an image can be embedded into an email or a Craigslist post, where other things like javascript or iframes would be blocked by email software or site providers.

We will offer non-image twitterSALTs in the near future, for our users only using us for personal web pages, where there is no danger of them being blocked.

Doesn't generating images "on the fly" take a lot of CPU resources?

Yes!  We use mutiple servers to handle the processing needs required.  The servers communicate with a central task schedular, each grabbing the next available task.  If a server fails during a task, that task is automatically rescheduled for completion by another server.

Will including a SALT on my site make it slower?

We use AWS S3 for file storage.  This means your SALT is copied to multiple locations around the world.  When a user opens your page in their browser, your SALT is downloaded from the location closest to the user, making the download time for it probably faster than for the other images on your site!

What happens if the system breaks?

If twitter.com goes offline, then you won't be able to update, of course, but your existing SALT will still display normally.

If twitterSALT.com goes offline, You won't be able to modify your SALT configuration.  It's possible that your SALTs won't be able to update from new twitters, but, because we use AWS S3 storage, your SALT will still display normally.  Also, because of our multi-server architecture, it's probable that our main site could be offline, but we would still be updating SALTs in the background.

If AWS S3 goes offline ... This is unlikely, as this system is a geographically redundant system, so that if one location goes offline, the other locations take over.  If it goes offline, your page will still load, it just will not display your SALT.

Help! I want space under my header! Can I add \n to my header?

Yes!  We support adding carriage returns to the inline headers.  When you're typing your custom header, just add \n after it, or in the middle of it.  That will put a carriage return in your header, giving you the look you want.

What about my older posts? Do they just disappear?

No.  You can display your most recent twitter, one twitter older, two twitters older, three twitters older, and four twitters older.  So, you could display a total of your last five twitters, anywhere on the web.

How?

Let's say your twitter screen name is 'screenname'.  The code you would put in your web document would be as follows.

<img src="http://u1.twittersalt.com/screenname.gif">  = Your most recent twitter
<img src="http://u1.twittersalt.com/screenname1.gif">  = One twitter ago
<img src="http://u1.twittersalt.com/screenname2.gif">  = Two twitters ago
<img src="http://u1.twittersalt.com/screenname3.gif">  = Three twitters ago
<img src="http://u1.twittersalt.com/screenname4.gif">  = Four twitters ago

Use this in your page design to allow your readers to read older posts.