Moving to a Bigger Server

Weblin will move to a bigger server. The current server was supposed to be a test. It is working quite well. But for a long term production system, there should be a new system. The main difference is, that the test system was a single server and the new system will be a small cluster of several hosts. We will separate the server roles Web, Database, Messaging. This makes the system more powerful, more fault tolerant, and more scalable.

Most preparations are already done. The transition is supposed to happen on Sunday morning. There will be a downtime for several hours, which you hopefully won't notice because I plan to get up early and be ready when most people go online.

First Month in Pictures

It is now one month since relaunch. The number of active Weblins is about 3400. 3400 Weblins have been online at least once in the last month. Each week are about 2000 different Weblins online. At most 10% of all "active" Weblins are concurrently online. This number grows slowly every week. Yesterday (Wednesday) was the highest number since relaunch. There are new registrations all the time and there are also returning Weblins who reactivate old accounts.

Weblins who are concurrently online. The number fluctuates between day and night. We are very much dominated by Europe. The peak is at about 9 pm (UTC+2). But sometimes there are also many Weblins in the Portuguese room on the Weblin home page. I suppose they are from Brasil and make the small bump in the middle of the European night, when it's evening in Brasil.

New registrations and re-activations: they remain constant without any ads or press activity. This will probably grow, whe
n we start telling former Weblin users, that we are back.

The most important indicators for online games. Later Weblin will measured by these numbers. Monthly and weekly unique active users and the number of new users (=Activated). In addition, there is the number of weekly returning users. These are the users who do not just try Weblin, but are still using it a week later. The ration is quite good. A possible explanation is, that primarily former Weblin users create new accounts. They know what to expect and do not just try it out.

Request for Participation: Weblin Code Wiki

I just found the contents of the Weblin Code Wiki. It has technical documentation of Weblin.

The most important part is probably the Weblin Sitekit framework. Weblin Sitekit lets Web pages communicate with the Weblin client. You can create great applications with this framework. There where examples of an interactive adventure, a dance floor, where avatars would dance automatically. You can create an avatar theater where avatars play a script. And there more features hidden in the Wiki.

Weblin Sitekit is a tool for Web page and JavaScript programmers. But if someone makes an app with weblin Sitekit, then all weblins can participate.

We are now looking for volunteers who install and operate the Wiki. I can make the data available:

• mysql database backup (MySQL dump 10.11 of mysqld 5.0.32): "code_wiki.sql.gz" (108 kb)
• PHP-files of the Mediawiki: "mediawiki.tgz" (14 MB)

If someone has server space and some time to setup the Wiki, we would be happy. Please write to wolf@weblin.com

Your Questions About New Features

In short: new developments, new features, new avatars are currently not planned. We can not promise anything.

We run weblin without commercial support. Installation of the new Web site and necessary updates to client and server took about 4 weeks of work. Currently the system runs stable. But every day we have to check backups, respond to user questions, check uploaded images, investigate complaints, and occasionally ban offending users.

In other words: we are already busy in our spare time.

We have to wait until there are more Weblins. We are now at 2.500 active accounts. There are up to 350 Weblins online concurrently. It is slowly growing. Today were more Weblins online than ever since relaunch. Please be patient, invite your friends, talk, twitter, blog about Weblin, find more users.

Then we will find ways to build new features in addition to the operating effort. Until then we will continue to re-activate weblin features and hope for your help.

2000 Weblins

This was the first week after relaunch. Several hundred weblins have been created without ads and media announcements, just by word of mouth. Even more reactivated their old accounts.

In the (European) evening there are more than 300 weblins concurrently online. At night, the number drops to about 150. We just crossed the mark of 2000 active users. This means, that 2000 different user accounts have been online in he first week.

The image shows the number of connections at the XMPP server. Each connection represents a running weblin client:

This is incredible, great, unbelievable. Thank you all.

More than 200 Weblins Online

On it's first day after relaunch weblin got more than 200 concurrent users online.

Weblin is Back

The weblin homepage www.weblin.com is online. The Download works. Users can now log in and create new weblins. They can wousle (the weblin way poking), send gifts, select avatars from the gallery, upload avatars, use effects on web pages and much more.

freeavat4r.com is Transferring to Weblin

During the last 2 years a dedicated, but anonymous Weblin user kept Weblin running. There was a download at the domain freeavat4r.com. Several thousand users downloaded and used Weblin from there.

Weblin will soon be relaunched on http://www.weblin.com. The intermediate solution is not necessary anymore. But if freeavat4r.com is just closed, then Weblins registered with freeavat4r.com would cease to run.

We cooperate with the operator of freeavat4r.com to migrate users before freeavat4r.com closes. If everything works well, then you should not notice the transition.

Thanks you to the operator of freeavat4r.com for the 2 years and for the offer to transfer the domain.

Browser Compatibility Restored

Over the last 2 years, while weblin was in hibernation, the browsers continued to develop. Especially Firefox and Chrome change heavily. It happened, that these changes affect internal features, which weblin uses to extract the web page URL. In other words: as browsers change, they become incompatible with weblin.

The problems have been solved and weblin works again with the latest versions of all 3 major browsers.

The image shows avatars on 3 different browsers.

Blog Reactivated

This is the first post after 2 years of downtime.