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!