I've been using Shannon Whitley's SPIURL code for the last couple of weeks, and it's a very simple way to create permanent links to user's portraits. In the last few days though I started to notice it returning a lot of 404 errors for images. Digging into it, I was hitting the 100 request-per-hour limit. Looking through the documentation this makes sense, what has me confused is how it was working before! Was the limit not actually being enforced for anonymous access to http://twitter.com/users/show/screen_name.xml until recently?
I know there's some other developers using this, so here's my patch to authenticate those API calls: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/03/adding-authentication-to-the-spiurl-permanent-twitter-portrait-project.html Pete Warden
