Weblin Helper Chrome Extension

One of the changes, which Google introduced with Chrome Version 29 made Chrome incompatible with weblin. In other words: no weblins with Chrome 29.

A new Chrome extension in the Google Web Store corrects this. The extension adds weblins back to Chrome.

The extension is not yet included in the weblin installer. It must be installed manually with 2 steps:

1. Add the Chrome extension from here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/weblin-helper/cedamdmlplebpfigaldiimmbdkdcopeb

2. Add these lines to the file "Browsers.sreg" in the weblin program folder (e.g. with Notepad):

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\zweitgeist\Oberser\Browsers\GoogleChrome29]
"Active"=dword:1
"Name"="GoogleChrome 29"
"Description"="GoogleChrome"
"MainClass"="Chrome_"
"MainClassUsage"=dword:2
"MainCaption"="Google Chrome"
"MainCaptionUsage"=dword:3
"TextClass"="Chrome_"
"TextClassUsage"=dword:2

The extension will be included in the weblin installer later.

First Weblin with Black Crown

Macr@Soft is the first Weblin with a black crown points level.(http://www.weblin.com/toplins.php):

A black crown means more than 2^16 = 65536 points. You can get up to 100 points each day. But this is very difficult. A "Power-User" may reach about 70 points a day. This means, that Macr@Soft is a power user every other day or that he was online every day since introduction of the weblin points system. Anyway, Macr@Soft is the most active weblin ever.

Congratulations.

Weblin Trademark and Logo

The trademark "Weblin" and the Weblin Logo (right) are registered and protected. Name and logo must not be used without explicit permission. 

In general we like any decent activity in the Weblin space. We are supporting people who create tools, clients, communities, and additional services. Especially mobile is an interesting area.

Unfortunately, there are always black sheep, who misuse the Weblin trademark. We had to deal with strange things, which were completely unrelated to Weblin. We must be able to prohibit the use of the Weblin trademark by these people to protect our users. Most users can not differentiate easily between service offers. They see a Weblin logo and assume, that it is a Weblin service or at least endorsed by Weblin. We want to prevent normal people from being mislead.

We have to protect the trade mark. Therefore, name and logo must not be used without permission. Unfortunately, the trademark law requires, that a trademark is actively "defended". Therefore we require, that everyone obtains a permission. We can not let some people use it without permission and require permission from others. That would allow black sheep to argue, that the trademark is not actively used and that may invalidate it over time.

By the way: there are people, who payed for the trademark with their own hard earned money. It is at least not fair to use the brand name without asking.

So, if someone wants to use Weblin name or logo, then he/she should contact the trademark manager and discuss a license.

Contact: 

Lupus Labs UG
Waterloostr. 26
22769 Hamburg
Germany
info@weblin.com

Weblin Fun

It is no fun to ban weblins form the toplist. It is no fun to check log files for unfair behavior. It is no fun to reply to complaints. It is no fun to ban accounts because of illegal images. It is no fun to program several hours to fight unfair behavior.

We keep Weblin running in our spare time. Sometimes a server is down. Then someone spends several hours to fix it. Sometimes web browsers change and someone must program to make Firefox and IE and Chrome work with Weblin. Sometimes there are attacks on servers from unknown parties and someone has to fight it. Apart from the fact that running the servers for Weblin costs 150 € each month of our private money.

From your point of view, Weblin is just there. You just start it and the weblin appears on the page. But this is not a given. It is much work. Someone watches and gets up at 2 am to fix it, if necessary.

It would be nice, if you would not add to this work by doing unfair things and uploading indecent images.

New SSL Certificate

I just installed a new SSL certificate on www.weblin.com. The old certificate was installed by Zweitgeist for 3 years. It expires January, 20th. I now bought a new certificate valid for 2 more years.

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.

weblin new version with new design and effects

Finally, the new weblin version is downloadable for a few minutes now! The new version enables a set of effects on websites, such as raining roses and setting a website under water.
As a weblin user you can buy items with virtual currency and social points combined. The new version is in download now, the update version for all users will follow on monday.
The new website design is very cool. Have Fun

weblin begins 2009 with two million users

2.000.000 users, what a finish in 2008. The year 2009 begins with very good news for weblin and we have a lot of plans bringing weblin to the next stage in 2009. For the moment we are very happy to finally managed all the more than 50 servers to work well and stable with this huge user base. The buddy list is up and running again, for a few weeks now. There will be a website design relaunch shortly and a funny new way to send gifts and trow some graphical bombs on websites will be available soon. There will come a lot of other features and fun stuff, this year.
So, stay with us and enjoy the weblin way 2009. Free speech on websites!

Scalability Strategies Primer: Database Sharding

Database partitioning is definitely a hot topic for weblin. Weblin does primarily vertical dataset partitioning where each feature gets its own database.

If that does not help anymore then we will probably add horizontal partitioning on top of vertical partitioning.

So, features have their databases with a primary-secondary setup. If a DB is overloaded by a feature then the cluster is split into multiple clusters which serve disjunct sets of item IDs.

Finally! weblin frees Avatars from Second Life

One unique avatar, stepping from one virtual world to another. This was the idea and weblin made it come true. The new weblin Gate portal allows avatars to roam from the virtual world of Second Life(R) to the Web, which is the biggest virtual world. Isn´t it?
Yesterday, at 8:00 am Boston time we sent out the press release and just few hours later, there was a bunch of people waiting in the weblin house in SL, to be teleported to the web. How cool is that?

If you are a SL user try it.
Fast Facts about weblin Gate (according to "stargate", not watergate of course):
-- The Weblin house in Second Life is located in New Berlin, close to the tower at Alexanderplatz: New Berlin 221, 73, 32 (PG).
-- The Second Life avatar is capable of performing all the actions of a weblin avatar, such as walking left and right, dancing, laughing or waving.
-- The 3D data is then exported as a library of animated GIFs and once the conversion is finished, the user receives a link and is directed to a personalized weblin login landing page, built with a token. With the token, the generated library can be mapped to one's weblin account.
-- Interoperability between virtual worlds is something Linden Lab actively supports. This is a positive and encouraging development for Second Life users to add more dimension to our user experience.

There are already a lot of blog posts covering weblin Gate. One of the posts I liked best for now ist: Common|Sensible.
Have fun!

weblin works with Chrome 1.0

Googles Browser Chrome, which surprisingly changed to version 1.0 today, is working for weblin as well as Windows IE and Firefox.