My original goal was to find out how it is to build a server and clients for such service. This goal was fulfilled a long time ago. So it has continued to run fine as it was with zero maintenance… until this last hosting problem where I had to disable the display part of the site.

Hi. I have some news about Moodgeist. It’s not that great, but what can you do.

I’ve run into a bit of hosting trouble with the site. It does not really work that well in a shared hosting environment where I’m running it, and I don’t at this time have time or energy to put into fixing it.

So I had to turn off the part of the site that displays things.

In a short and sweet format, here’s what’s the current state of the site and service.

• It continues to accept mood pings from compliant clients.
• The wiki continues to be available. You can still download and run the clients and they’ll happily send mood pings. I just don’t display the pings at this time. (Funnily enough, the part that accepts pings is much easier to run than the displaying part.)
• The site code is intact and fine. I could reactivate it at any time after either fixing it or finding better hosting for it. I just don’t have enough motivation at this time to make the site into a better shape and spend my time or money getting better hosting.
• Also the data collected throughout the site’s life is intact and sits fine in the database, awaiting better opportunities.
• I continue to like Moodgeist as a personal research/experiment project and I still may some things with it at some point. This is why I didn’t just nuke the whole site, but just deactivated a part of it for the time being. (But note that the previous sentence says “may” not “will”, and does not give any time frame. I have no idea if/when I will actually get back to it.)

Please track the blog for updates and future plans.

regards,
Jaanus

Although I could do animated emoticons as well, I’ve hardcoded it to static for now, as too many animated emoticons on a page can be really obnoxious. And so now it’s hardcoded to static. Perhaps in the future we’ll have per-user preferences so that you could also switch it to animated if you wanted to.

Also hi to my friend Ross Mayfield who did a post on us :)

We now have a project wiki. And there you can find a pinger for Mac as well as an updated Windows Pinger. The old Pinger was reported to be crashing with newer Skype for Windows version, and this new one seems to have fixed it.

Coming up: we need to shift all the documentation to wiki, most notably the ping API and feed docs. And brush up the server side with some bugfixes as well as new features. Plus perhaps add some things like Twitter pinging to the clients.

The wiki is initially read-only to regular users due to spam concerns and keeping things tidy, but if you have an idea for a good edit or bugfix or whatever, let me (Jaanus) know and I’ll add you to the list.

The only sad part is that the embed YouTube code is not XHTML compliant and thus our frontpage no longer validates :(

I documented the new Pinger birth and so let’s look also at what’s changed in this version and how the changes came about. Here are the changelog entries with comments.

bugfix: no longer ping the mood of SkypeOut contacts (as they don’t have any)

This one’s easy, when pinging just verify if it is a SkypeOut contact or not and branch accordingly.

bugfix: “Run Pinger at Windows startup” option works now

This was a tough one. Everything seemed fine — I inserted the right information in registry at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, but nothing got run at login. Even though the other entries ran.

So finally I found the culprit. How I insert the registry key is that I just take the value of System.Environment.CommandLine, supposedly the full path to the executable program, and put it in the registry. As it turns out, this got a space appended to its end out of nowhere, and Mister Computer and Missis Windows decide they’re too picky to run the registry entries in the Run branch if the values have an extra space in the end. So a simple trim() call fixed that.

bugfix: smarter handling of “refused” and startup situations when starting Pinger, Skype and many other things at the same time (translation: it works now)

Yeah… just some more logic to wait until Skype initialization is complete until trying to connect to the contact list.

change: in addition to periodic “full pings”, listening to the “mood changed” event also works. When an incoming mood change event arrives, Pinger pings it instantly, so no moods are lost.

I got some strange COM library versioning bug a while ago so the mood change event just didn’t seem to exist in the Pinger project in Visual Basic, even though it existed elsewhere. After going to the new version of the COM, looks fixed and the mood events are happily flowing.

So we fixed the layout bug that drove the pages nuts if someone was putting long URL-s in their moods. All URL-s are truncated now, but still go to the right place, and it all looks nice.

We still don’t have a Pinger for Mac or Linux :( contributions would be welcome. (I got a Mac and it would be fun to write one, but time, time, other matters keep pressing…)