How do I solve an unknown Twitter error in WordPress?

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ddixon
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I have about a dozen Wordpress blogs (all but 1 using the Platform Theme) which has a setting that allows for the most recent tweet to be displayed in the footer.

Example blog: http://courantblogs.com/sound-check/

In the past week or so, I'll sporadically get an "Unknown twitter error" and in addition to that, the Jetpack twitter feed widget that I display in the right rail will display this message: Error: Twitter did not respond. Please wait a few minutes and refresh this page.

After doing some reading, it sounds like it may be related to the fact that I'm running multiple twitter api lookups? Am I going to continue having this problem because I have multiple websites on my server that are running a twitter feed?

http://www.pagelines.com/forum/discussion/13334/problems-with-platform-1.5.3/p1

http://www.pagelines.com/forum/discussion/14734/unknown-twitter-error-problem/p1

Thanks for any help.
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Tim S.
Hi ddixon, Thanks for posting your question. I'm happy to help you today. This isn't an error I've ran across before personally, so I had to do some digging around to see what I could find for you. Thanks for the links by the way, it actually started to point me in the right direction. It sounds like the method in which these plugins pull your Twitter feeds is generic. In these instances, Twitter watches to see if what they feel is abusive behavior when making requests is occurring. If they think that any one site with the same IP address is being abusive, they will rate limit the traffic from that IP address. Again, let me re-iterate this is speculation, since the errors are really generic in nature. Ideally, what most forum users are saying as a fix, is to either gain a dedicated IP address, so others in the shared environment aren't affecting you, or look for a plugin that uses the OAUTH authentication method. Here's some documentation I found on it: Unknown Twitter Error Now, you are free to purchase a dedicated IP address. Keep in mind, this may not resolve the issue, if in fact, one of your dozen sites is causing Twitter to rate limit the API's requests. Here's a link on requesting a dedicated IP address: Requesting a dedicated IP address I hope this helps! If you need further assistance please feel free to contact us. Thanks! Tim S