An interesting feature of the Swarm app is how it handles photos uploaded to checkins. If you check in and attach a photo, the checkin is actually created before the photo is uploaded. If you're on a spotty Internet connection, you'll see this because your checkin will exist and you'll get points for it, but there won't be a photo yet. The app will then continue to upload the photo separately, retrying if it fails. This is actually a really great app design on the part of Foursquare, but does lead to some tricks with the API.
Since OwnYourSwarm uses Foursquare's realtime API, it will receive a POST request almost immediately, often before the photo exists at the API. This means the initial Micropub request might be missing the photo.
Today I made OwnYourSwarm send a Micropub update request to update your post after the photo is uploaded. When you post a checkin, if there is no photo, then OwnYourSwarm queues a background job on a 15-second delay. It will then check after 15 seconds to see if a photo exists, and sends an update request with the photo URL if so. If still no photo is found after 15 seconds, it will wait another 30 seconds and try again. This continues for the following schedule: 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour. We'll see if this is too much polling, but the rate limits on Foursquare are relatively high. (500 requests per user per hour). This does mean that every checkin with intentionally no photo will be requested from Foursquare 8 times.
I had originally planned on using this same polling schedule to later pull back responses to your checkins (likes, and comments), but Ryan pointed out that I can probably use a simpler and more efficient polling schedule since the Foursquare API provides a method to return the last N checkins.
