Mibbit blog

There’s some new features in development that should make Mibbit even better and easier to use. We’re just working on the finishing touches.

A couple of features that snuck in while you may not have been looking – errors/alerts now popup in a lightbox modal type dialog, and you can setup your chat to look a bit more rounded (Not in internet explorer)

We’ve also been spending more time to ensure that Mibbit stays up – even if the hosting co decides to reboot all the servers

Also hit a nice record today, of 8,500 connections on Mibbit at the peak today. Possible we could hit 10,000 by end of year. Thanks again to everyone who has helped realize the vision of Mibbit so far, there’s a lot left to come

Unfortunately our webhost had some issues tonight and had to power cycle each server.

It looks like everything is working fine now, but apologies for any downtime.

http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4765

http://twitter.com/linode

If you’ve never heard of LaTeX before, you’re not alone. LaTeX is a markup language for typesetting, and is often used to write formulae so that they show up properly.

Here’s the wikipedia article, with cool tutorials and references listed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

LaTeX parsing is enabled by default, but it’s in prefs if you’d rather turn it off. Any LaTeX is enclosed in “{$ ” and ” $}” to signify it’s LaTeX.

For example, you could write “blauegh! Formula should be {$ f(x)=\int_{-\infty}^xe^{-t^2}dt $} and NOT {$ f(x)=\int_{-\infty}^xe^{-t^2000}dt $} silly!“

And here’s an example of how it shows up in Mibbit.

For some, this will be completely irrelevant, but it seems a useful thing to have in a visual webchat client

All backends have been updated with new code, here’s the main feature updates:

• Mibbit clients now respond to CTCP TIME requests, with the users local time and timezone.
• The users local time and country are now shown in /whois replies. The country is via a simple lookup on the users IP.
• If you have icons showing in the user list (Green/blue guys), you can click on one. They’ll all change to showing flags. Click again, and they’ll all change to showing time of day icons (mouseover for exact local time + zone). Click again and they’ll go back to icons.

– Morning (8:00 am – 12:00 noon)

– Day (12:00 noon – 18:00 pm)

– Evening (18:00 pm – 22:00 pm)

– Night (22:00 pm – 8:00 am)

This means you can easily see with a couple of clicks where people are, and what sort of timezone they’re in

-> ->

* You can now change the colors of the text, and links that show up in input menus such as [Translation] [Pastebin] etc. Checkout [Prefs]->[Chat input].

* You can now change the icons that show to the left of users in the User List. If you don’t like the usual blue/green people, change it to something more fitting with the rest of your theme. For example, here’s some big monkeys.

Here’s the relevant settings, which can be found in [Prefs]->[User List].

The widget manager at http://widget.mibbit.com/manager/ has been updated with the latest prefs system. So you’ll see previews for many chat elements, color picker, skins – all the same extras as in the main client :)

<tech bit>

Stability should be ok for now, the root cause has been traced to the Java DNS lookup system, which is just really bad. Download the source from sun and take a look :/ The result of dns lookups can sometimes be wrong, and can also crash the JVM with a segfault. Not good.

We had issues with the Java DNS lookup system when we used it for reverse queries, so I wrote a DNS client from scratch to deal with this. I’m now just modifying that to be able to handle forward queries / recursive lookups etc, then we will be rid of the Java DNS lookups entirely, and rid of the bugs/issues that come with using it sometimes. The replacement should be ready this week or early next.

Just upgraded all Mibbit backends to the latest. This should mean less restarts/uptime issues going forward. It looks like there is a bug in the JVM 1.6.

Couple of updates to the main client:

• 2 new preset skins (See above)
• You can now use $? in aliases/custom menus to prompt you for something. For example, you could prompt for your password, or a kick reason. It steals focus and then gives it back, so no need to use the mouse.

The [prefs] UI has all been updated, tidied up, and made more intuitive (hopefully).

Login to Mibbit at https://www.mibbit.com/chat/ and click on [prefs].

There’s a new [Skins] tab, which enables you to quickly choose from default skins. We’ll be adding many more in the future. Just select a skin, check the boxes you want to load, and click [load].

You’ll also notice that there are previews of the UserList, ChatInput and ChatOutput, so you can quickly see how things will look.

Also we have an easy color picker to make things even easier to get things looking exactly how you want them to.

The new prefs system is live in the main client, and will soon be duplicated in the Widget Manager, to make it easy to get widgets to look just how you want.

Take a look around the new prefs system, there are several additions, like the Topic Bar, so you can change the font/colors there as you like now.

Thanks again for using Mibbit, we’re still hitting growth records every week which is awesome

Along with 27,000 others, Mibbit staffer Tony (fastundia) trotted out on Sunday 21st June to the start of the London to Brighton bike ride at Clapham South.

British Heart Foundation put on a great day for everyone, well organised, and despite the hills and stop-start-stop on the early bit it turned into a real scorcher Chariots-of-Fire ending with lovely sunshine and a sprint finish.

The bike ride covered 54 miles, and is Europes largest charity bike ride. Sponsorship total raised was £417.97.

Well done Fastundia

If you haven’t checked already, please check out the privacy policy at http://mibbit.com/privacy.html

We take our users privacy extremely seriously, and will do all we can to ensure that is protected. If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know.

In summary:

* We do not log anything unless a user asks us to.

* If a channel owner has enabled ‘recent chat’ a small log of that channel is held in memory.

* We use selected keywords from channels to provide relevant contextual advertising.

* If you use the automatic translation service, your chat will be sent to the Google API – please check their privacy policy also.