Starship Asterisk*

I maintain the APOD Twitter account (@apod) and created a backup search engine during the NASA shutdown last year (http://apod.it). As a result of these things I've gradually built up a database of parsed APOD entries including the titles, descriptions, dates, credit lines and URLs for the images. I...

During the shutdown I realised that most of the English mirror sites don't have the search facility that the main site has. So I created one: http://strudel.org.uk/apod/ . You can search by words, by phrase (put it in quotation marks) and limit results to those without specific words (put a minus si...

It has been over a year since my last update so thought you may like to know that the APOD Twitter account now has 712,495 followers.

Just a brief update to say that @apod on Twitter now has over half a million followers.

Just thought I'd mention that the APOD twitter account now has over 250,000 followers. In other news I got OAuth sorted so the Twitter account has been updating automatically for a while now. For OAuth Twitter requires a unique application name that it then uses on individual tweets by adding e.g. &...

A quick way to see most of the mentions of APOD on Twitter is to go to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=apod. This will pull out comments from anyone replying to the @APOD account (by starting a tweet with "@APOD") as well as those re-tweeting (sharing the @APOD tweet with others by repe...

Rob, I don't know for sure but I suspect the smooth, consistent growth is due to Twitter featuring @APOD in some way to new users during the sign up process. In 2009 Twitter started providing a small group of followers - mostly US celebrities - to new users automatically during the sign-up process (...

I am the person updating APOD on Twitter. I've actually emailed Rob twice about this (September 2007 and August 2009) to check that it was OK for me to be do this and then continue doing it. In both cases Rob said that it was OK. Makc is correct that I did also run the official International Year of...