Sporadic 400 responses from twitter API call

Question

I am getting seemingly random 400 errors from a twitter api call on my site. It doesn't seem to be rate limiting, as it doesn't appear to be time based, while testing I did not experience it at all, whilst my designer (who had not been hitting refresh over and over) could not see the tweet at all, then suddenly could.

this is the call

$file = @file_get_contents('http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=mildfuzz&count=1');

Can Twitter be down in specific areas? It seems odd to get different results based on location.

Answer 1

It turned out the best way was to make sure I was always checking my rate limit, no idea why, but this seems to alert Twitter to the fact that I have some limit left.

I am also now keeping a copy of each tweet in the database.