Personalized room links
All rooms on Lingr have always had similar links: http://www.lingr.com/room/cIVONMd17mp. But now we’ve enabled a new feature that allows you to personalize those links, so you can change that string of characters into something meaningful: http://www.lingr.com/room/rubyonrailscamp2006.
How to choose a room’s link
To change an existing room’s link, go to its settings page by clicking on the Settings link in the room, or in the room summary in any list of rooms. (This only works, of course, if you’re logged in and are trying to change the settings of a room you created.) There you’ll see a new item — Room link — that shows you the room’s current link. To change it, click Change this link and type something in.
When you create a new room, you can specify the room’s link right away, in the same manner that I’ve just described.
Room links must be unique within Lingr. As you’re choosing a link and typing it in, Lingr will automatically let you know if someone else has already taken the link you want. Also, you can only use the symbols - _ . in your links.
As always, we support all languages and character sets. However, not all browsers do, so Lingr will warn you if your chosen link — though valid and available — might be encoded by some browsers. That’s not necessarily a problem; just something you might want to think about.
Choose your room link carefully
Once you’ve chosen a link, you’ll probably want to stick with it from then on. If someone links to your room, and then you change the room’s link, the old links won’t work any more.
If you’d rather not choose a link for your room, you can just stick with the default link provided. If you want to wait and set the room link later on, that’s cool — just don’t choose a room link when you’re creating your room.
Et cetera
Ruby on Rails Camp went really well. I demoed Lingr during the Speed Demo session, and the response was overwhelmingly positive.
Lingr now supports MicroID. As Danny summarizes on his blog: MicroID is a way to claim ownership of your assets on the web.
As usual, we’ve revised a fair number of other details on the site, in our ongoing effort to make Lingr as usable as possible and to respond to your feedback as much as possible. Most notable amongst those: We’ve AJAXified the archive calendar navigation and enabled a special auto-linking feature for Lingr room links, and the in-room MP3 player now has its own volume control.
