Lingr Blog

Lingr contributed to "The Truth About Marika" winning Emmy Award!

Today, we proudly announce that the Swedish TV production "The Truth About Marika" (Sanningen om Marika) has won the International Interactive Emmy Award for Best Interactive TV service, where Lingr played a key role of the alternate reality and role-playing game in the production. Woohoo!

Watch the introduction trailer, as well as the hub site Conspirare.

Andie Nordgren, the producer and technical lead of The company P, sent the email to us about this great news. Thanks Andie, and congratulations!

- Kenn

Time to release!

We love that you send us your feedback, and we’ve been listening.

Today, we’ve rolled out some new features, all based on your requests and suggestions.

Message deletion

Room owners are now able to delete messages in their rooms.

In a room or room archive, click the ¶ link at the right end of a message and you’ll see the button to delete the message.

Many people have requested this feature, but our policy has always been to keep away from content censoring. So we’ve had some concerns that required careful consideration.

In the end, though, we’ve decided that this is more about someone who speaks personal information without realizing that Lingr’s chat logs are permanent, rather than censorship or moderation.

Progress indicator for messages

Up until now, if something went wrong between our servers and your browser, it was possible for you to lose a message without knowing it. The message would appear in your browser, but not actually make it to anyone else.

Now, you’ll see a spinning wheel every time you send a message, and that spinning wheel will disappear once the message has been successfully delivered.

So there’s no longer any need to reload to confirm if your message has been sent.

More room information

We added some room information in the side bar area, to be sure that everyone knows the room details, even when you come into a room from somewhere other than Lingr.

Owner: This is the room owner’s nickname.
Privacy: This can be “public”, “unlisted”, “public and passworded”, or “unlisted and passworded”.

Public means the room is listed in Lingr’s public directory and the chat archives are searchable by Google, while unlisted means that the room cannot be found unless the link to the room is known, and that the chat archives are hidden from Google. Passworded means that the room is protected by a password and only those who know the password can enter the room, so the chat archives are not accessible from Google even if the room is “public and passworded”.

We hope you enjoy the new release!

- Kenn

Release Notes: Goodies for Fans

Greetings Lingrers,

Here's the new stuff on Lingr.

Email notification for private message

If you use Lingr Radar or other equivalents, now you can receive email notification when someone sends a private message to your Radar, without the need to disclose your email address.

If you don't want the email notification, unsubscribing is easy - Just go to your account, and turn off the emailing option at the bottom.

For API developers: "A radar equivalent" means that client_type is set to "automaton" and the permission for API key is set as "observe-only".

Google Video supported

Finally. Recently I had a chance to realize that Google Video was a good fit to share my private movies in my family room.

For those who don't know about Google Video, it allows you to set an "Unlisted" option to a movie, which makes the movie publicly accessible, but only to the people who know the movie URL. That's exactly the same way as we do in unlisted chat rooms. I love it!

To post a movie in your chat room, you just paste the movie URL like http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8618166999532839788, and you see the movie as follows.

Enjoy posting movies using Google Video!

System message suppression - now optional

In the past release, we made a decision to suppress system messages such as "John has joined" or "John has left". On the one hand it's been going well, but on the other some of you didn't seem to like it.

That response drove us to reconsider, and this time we've changed it to an option per room.

Note that all join/leave messages are recorded at the backend, whichever option you take. All you do is to toggle whether you want to show them or not. So you can safely try out and switch between them, at any time.

Better timestamps

Now you would see message timestamps appear less frequently, having the date for ones not spoken today.

Other changes and fixes

• Private message from an observer now recognizes if the observer is signed-in
• Fixed sudden signed-in status invalidation
• Fixed duplicated "connection: close" header for API

We hope you like it!

- Kenn

Thanks Danny

Today, they say, is Sysadmin Appreciation Day. The 8th annual, in fact. Which is strangely apropos, since Danny is working harder than usual today, due to the power shenanigans over at our colo.

At any rate, Danny is responsible for many things around here, one non-trivial chunk of which is managing all our varied and sundry systems. And he definitely deserves thanks and appreciation for that work. So, thanks Danny! And keep up the great work.

Planned downtime

Due to power circuit maintenance at our hosting provider, Lingr will be unavailable tomorrow, July 27, beginning at 10:00am PDT.  Our provider has scheduled up to three hours of downtime, but we hope that the actual downtime will be much shorter than that.

Further power circuit maintenance will occur on Saturday, July 28, beginning at 10:00am PDT.  Again, our provider has scheduled up to three hours of downtime, but we hope that the actual downtime will be much shorter than that.

During most the maintenance periods,  you will see a static "down for an upgrade" page, but there may be brief periods during which you will not get any response.

We regret the downtime, but unfortunately there is really nothing we can do about it, since our provider is cutting power during those periods.

- Danny

UPDATE

Our provider has delayed these maintenance intervals until 10:00pm PDT for both Friday and Saturday

Back online from power outage

Today at about 1:50pm PDT, Lingr went down for a few hours due to the power outage in San Francisco, which impacted on our co-location center. To complicate matters, the power outage also affected TypePad, who hosts our blog, so we could not blog about it right away.

Danny had promptly started to recover the service and it should be fully back up now, but let us know in case you find any flaws.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

- Kenn

WWDC Keynote Live Blogging

Chris will be live-blogging today's WWDC Keynote here (assuming WiFi connectivity is good enough, which has been an issue at past WWDCs).  Join us and let's all commiserate over having to wait a few more weeks for the iPhone  :-)

- Danny

Lingr in the blog-o-news

Zack Chandler just posted an interview with Danny over at SFRuby.org: sfruby.org/posts/interview-w-lingr. This one’s much more focused on Rails than the last interview they did.

Also, I’m extremely late mentioning this, but back in the spring Technorati Japan’s BlogTV stopped by our office in San Mateo to interview Kenn:

Kenn tells me it’s about his experiences starting Lingr. All I know is, they didn’t include the bits with me and Danny making funny faces.

- Chris

Towards an even more open API

Since we first released the Lingr API, by far the most frequent request that we've had was to allow embedding a chatroom in a web page.  Some of our developers have actually created such things, but they all suffered from one drawback- because our API was fully REST compliant, it wasn't possible to do many interesting things purely from Javascript.  The reason for this is that the REST convention is that any operation that changes state on the server should be an HTTP POST operation.  That makes perfect sense, however, it kills any possibility of a purely Javascript/JSON implementation, because, while Javascript can certainly perform POST operations, it cannot do so asynchronously, nor can it retrieve the results of a POST (well, while this isn't technically true, it is practically true).  The solution that most developers have taken is to proxy the POST calls through their own servers.  This works fine, but, it seems like an unnecessary complication.

We were faced with a conundrum- on the one hand, we want to be REST compliant, because we're engineers and every engineer loves a nice, cut-and-dry specification.  On the other hand, we want to allow pure Javascript clients to access our full API, because, as we've learned, the most interested Lingr API clients don't originate from the lingr.com domain :-)

So today, I'm happy to announce that we've opened up all of our API methods to HTTP GET operations.  Even though the documentation for a particular method may still state that POST is required, in fact, on the backend, we've disabled HTTP method checking for API calls.

In addition, we've published lingr.js, a full read-only Lingr chatroom client in Javascript.  While it is missing some obvious functionality (the ability to say something, for example), it is a great starting point to embedding a chatroom in your web pages.  You can find documentation on lingr.js over at the Lingr Developer Wiki.  We'll continue to add new functionality to lingr.js- this is just the beginning.

If you use lingr.js, please let us know, and add your creation to the Showcase.  We're eager to see how people take this ball and run with it.

- Danny

Update: we have added say capability to lingr.js :-)

No more system messages in chatrooms

We have deployed a new release that suppresses system messages in the chatroom.  That means no more messages like "john has joined the conversation", "john is now known as john-boy", etc.- we reserve all the chatroom space for user messages now.

Note that system messages will still appear in the archives- we think that they are necessary to understand the context of conversations that occurred in the past.

Let us know what you think about this new feature by sending us feedback.

- Danny