You may have noticed that not much has been happening with Moodgeist recently. That’s because it remains what it originally started out: a personal research project around Skype mood messages. It remains so.
My original goal was to find out how it is to build a server and clients for such service. This goal was fulfilled a long time ago. So it has continued to run fine as it was with zero maintenance… until this last hosting problem where I had to disable the display part of the site.
As the title says. I just posted a bulletin on Moodgeist.com. Here’s a copy of it.
Hi. I have some news about Moodgeist. It’s not that great, but what can you do.
I’ve run into a bit of hosting trouble with the site. It does not really work that well in a shared hosting environment where I’m running it, and I don’t at this time have time or energy to put into fixing it.
So I had to turn off the part of the site that displays things.
In a short and sweet format, here’s what’s the current state of the site and service.
- It continues to accept mood pings from compliant clients.
- The wiki continues to be available. You can still download and run the clients and they’ll happily send mood pings. I just don’t display the pings at this time. (Funnily enough, the part that accepts pings is much easier to run than the displaying part.)
- The site code is intact and fine. I could reactivate it at any time after either fixing it or finding better hosting for it. I just don’t have enough motivation at this time to make the site into a better shape and spend my time or money getting better hosting.
- Also the data collected throughout the site’s life is intact and sits fine in the database, awaiting better opportunities.
- I continue to like Moodgeist as a personal research/experiment project and I still may some things with it at some point. This is why I didn’t just nuke the whole site, but just deactivated a part of it for the time being. (But note that the previous sentence says “may” not “will”, and does not give any time frame. I have no idea if/when I will actually get back to it.)
Please track the blog for updates and future plans.
regards,
Jaanus
A bot user was spamming Moodgeist with nonsensical moods. I guess it’s some statistical data, but it’s not relevant in Moodgeist. So I quickly did a feature to exclude certain users’ moods from being captured or displayed and now we’re nicely back to more sensical human-generated content :) and the latest moods and popular keywords look good again.
We now do emoticons. If you have put an emoticon in your Skype mood message, moodgeist.com knows how to display it. This means both the regular emoticion as well as the (flag:zz) type of country flags.
Although I could do animated emoticons as well, I’ve hardcoded it to static for now, as too many animated emoticons on a page can be really obnoxious. And so now it’s hardcoded to static. Perhaps in the future we’ll have per-user preferences so that you could also switch it to animated if you wanted to.
Since a month ago or so, we have a public chat for Moodgeist. You are very welcome to come and say anything you like or don’t like and discuss straight with us :)
We have removed “www.” from all hostnames on Moodgeist. It saves four bytes/characters of typing and just looks nicer 
this also affects the ping API. If you had a Pinger client running, update it to ping against the new endpoint without “www.” in it. (UPDATE: actually the old URL-s still remain working for now… but you may want to update anyway, as the ones without “www” are just nicer.)
We got a new Mac pinger that you can now run in “fire-and-forget” mode and also load on startup. It won’t die when Skype quits but rather sits around waiting for Skype to become available when it isn’t. I didn’t get the Twitter pinging part done yet but that’s next on my list.
Also hi to my friend Ross Mayfield who did a post on us :)
Just a quick note that we have had quite a few updates to Moodgeist over the past few weeks.
We now have a project wiki. And there you can find a pinger for Mac as well as an updated Windows Pinger. The old Pinger was reported to be crashing with newer Skype for Windows version, and this new one seems to have fixed it.
Coming up: we need to shift all the documentation to wiki, most notably the ping API and feed docs. And brush up the server side with some bugfixes as well as new features. Plus perhaps add some things like Twitter pinging to the clients.
The wiki is initially read-only to regular users due to spam concerns and keeping things tidy, but if you have an idea for a good edit or bugfix or whatever, let me (Jaanus) know and I’ll add you to the list.
This site was down for the past few weeks. We kept accepting pings, but the display interface was messed up. But apparently no one noticed and/or bothered to tell me :) fixed now.
We now have a pinger for Linux, contributed by Berkus who also works as a Skype for Linux developer. Thanks!
