Last week I checked Twitter and discovered the Twitter is currently down for database maintenance page. As usual I felt a sense of mild frustration. But, I also appreciated that it was a fun page, and that it did make me smile, slightly. I thought about the other Twitter fail pages - the fail whale and the Something is technically wrong page and again appreciated their simplicity.

So, for a bit of a giggle, I registered tweeterr.com and created a very simple site with a very simple aim - to make the twitter fail pages available all the time, even when Twitter is alive and well.

Media_httpfarm4static_svbki

It is very simple, just a few pages, with the homepage displaying a random fail page, a gallery displaying them all, and a page showing the last 20 twitter status messages.

As with most of the projects I do at home, it is written in PHP, and as with the other RSS aggregation pages I've used Richard James Kendall's PHP RSS Reader. Using a set of technologies I was familiar with meant that it went from being an idea on Tuesday morning, to being alive and working with all the functionality I wanted by Thursday evening.