Malice Afterthought

Sorry for the extended downtime. I spent Friday and Saturday at RubyNation, and then Sunday handling some cleanup, so I was unable to address the issues. If you want to know what happened, a recent Ruby interpreter vulnerability was discovered, which required I apply the patch; the upgrade broke Rails 2.2.2 somehow, so I ended up needing to bring YourData up to Rails 2.3.2, which required some extra changes, annoyingly.

Anyway, everything should be working now; let me know in the comments if there are additional problems!

YourData is currently offline. I'm doing an upgrade to some of the underlying tech, and things will be broken, probably for a good chunk of the day; sorry for the inconvenience.

Continuing my series of Action Streams plugins, I've added a new one for GitHub, since after all, if I'm using GitHub for development of these plugins, it'd be in poor taste if it didn't get its own plugin! :-)

Available on the Movable Type Plugins Download Page, as usual. Enjoy!

Since GitHub seems to be the "cool new place" to host open source code, and since I have no earthly reason to leave my MT plugins in a private repository, I've moved the code for all my Movable Type plugins to GitHub. The Movable Type page here will continue to have current information, as well as download links, for all of the plugins, but you can also obtain them from GitHub if you prefer.

The other nice thing, besides the cool factor, about GitHub is it gives me a nice issue tracker for each repository-- so rather than leaving blog comments here, if something is broken, you can now also post them there. Of course, I continue to read and respond to all comments posted here.

Just a few more changes today:

• I pulled several parts of unused JavaScript out of what Mnikr is serving, leading to about a 60K reduction (yes, that's after gzipping and minifying).
• I've increased the time the feed grabber is willing to wait for feeds; you shouldn't notice any additional load time, but some feeds that haven't been loading properly, now will, or at least more often. (Twitter's gone haywire, but that's not my fault.)
• I've added back @username linking in Twitter feeds, and added #hashtag linking as well (the latter to http://search.twitter.com, as Mnikr doesn't currently process hash tags). Hopefully this will be useful to those of you who have asked me for it!

Twitter data is now displaying correctly on profile pages.

In addition, the way profile pages are loaded has been changed, to allow for Mnikr's insane growth since launch (we are now tracking 10x as many identities as at launch, just over five days ago). Now data is loaded dynamically after the page has been rendered; make sure to leave feedback if you notice any problems with the new system.

Twitter currently isn't letting us pull updates from them. This is because we've switched to a new worker farm for update retrieval, and until Twitter authorizes it, there's nothing, unfortunately, we can do about this. ETA for a fix: 48 hours, possibly less.

Everything else should work as expected, however.

Mnikr is now live! Check it out, and check out the blog post about it at Times and Measures!

I've gone ahead and locked down Mnikr behind an Apache Username/Password gate, because I've pushed the last feature changes to it now, and need to wait for my advisor's approval before letting users sign up when they can actually do all the reputation trading! Hence, please check back next week (Tues/Wed) for a full launch, announced, one might hope, in all the most fashionable locations. :-)

Sorry I have to do this, but it's one of those academia things. I try to not let them impinge upon fun web services often.

I just pushed a lot of changes to the production server:

• New stylesheets! This means that there aren't any more image buttons; we're using CSS3 for rounded corners, so if you aren't using Firefox or Safari, well first of all, you should, but secondly, you only get boring square corners on your buttons. But everyone gets the nicer tab flow, as well as drastically reduced total page size (from cutting all the redundant junk out of the stylesheets).
• New Logo! As part of the redesign in the stylesheets, I also created a new logo, which is a bit nicer, and officially dropped the "Prime" designation; it's just called "Mnikr" now.
• New Search Features! There's now a search tab, which gives an easy way to find someone; it uses the same dynamic URL capabilities as before, but it's a nicer interface to it.
• New Feeds! Every profile now has an http://activitystrea.ms-compliant Atom feed on it; it's linked in the head section, so your browser will notice it, as well as having a link under the profile picture.
• New History! Profile activity streams, as well as the friends combined streams (for logged-in users), now have a way to access older batches of entries; just use the links for "Older" and "Newer" at the bottom of the page.

In the backend, of course, there's the usual bevy of performance fixes, stability enhancements, and the like. In addition, I rearchitected one of the backend daemons; while it doesn't give any changes to performance, it makes it a lot easier for me to code on (which is nice too). Massive props go to Simon Wistow for his Module::Pluggable CPAN module, which makes writing things like customized servers much, much easier. I've used it before, but I'm always amazed how good it really is.

So enjoy! The final round of major feature additions should be coming in the next couple of days, so stay tuned. And as always, feel free to go play around at http://www.mnikr.com!