AjaxLife Blog

AjaxLife currently costs roughly $130/month to run (less when it’s not actually running properly). Of this, I have made exactly $0/month back (lately).

As such, starting December 1st, AjaxLife will run for a month only when $130 in donations have been collected. The remainder of the time it will be down. So, if you want to use it, please donate!

A donation counter is available below:

The standard disclaimer about it not being my account, but an adult’s, etc. still applies.

This does mean that if the required donations are not reached reliably, AjaxLife’s uptime will be even patchier than it always is. On the other hand, if they are reached, it will be more reliable. Amazing, eh?

(And if the donations required, or something close, are never reached, AjaxLife will never be up.)

AjaxLife 0.5.1 has been released, featuring not much of anything.

Bug fixes

• Desktop version no longer shows “None” in the group list if you aren’t in any groups.
• iPhone version properly escapes messages.
• iPhone version resets unread local message count to zero when you read the messages.

I have a nice survey for people to take. Please do so. You can find it here.

Responses will actually be taken into account when working on things As many responses as possible would be appreciated; it should only take a few minutes.

Many thanks to those who take it!

I am currently not in a position to develop AjaxLife, mostly due to the brokenness of the internet over here, as well as time constraints.
The bug that was originally delaying the release is now fixed, but other significant work is in progress, and the system is currently unusable (IMs broken, chat buttons floating oddly, inventory window wildly oversized, strange formatting bugs, profiles unviewable, search only shows one name at a time, windows becoming unopenable after closing using the “x”, etc.)

That sounds like a very long list, but most of it comes down to a single bug. The IMs being broken is another bug, and windows being unopenable is already fixed, but I haven’t applied this to all windows yet.

I want and hope that this will be done by Monday. No promises though.

I’m going to be away for a week. Somebody send me an email tomorrow morning (GMT) reminding me to put AjaxLife’s latest code on my laptop.

[23:20 GMT] We’re back!

[23:15 GMT] Running the startup script again.

[23:04 GMT] Tested successfully, bundling again…

[22:49 GMT] Found the error: init-ajaxlife.sh: line 1: mono: command not found

[22:18 GMT] Startup script failed - it terminated the instance less than a minute after starting it. Trying to work out why…

[22:08 GMT] Watching the startup script run…

[21:44 GMT] Waiting for the bundling to finish.

[21:17 GMT] Image conversion should work now. Testing in progress…

[20:56 GMT] Image conversion is a pain. Still trying. >.>

[19:58 GMT] Running assorted tests

[19:41 GMT] Configuring AjaxLife server

[19:09 GMT] Rebuilding from scratch. 0% complete.

[UPDATE] As predicted, it’s down. Attempts to repair it are being foiled by such annoyances as lessons and wireless connections that drop constantly.

Due to accidental deletion of the manifest.xml file that goes with AjaxLife’s EC2 AMI, there is a reasonable chance that it’s going to break tomorrow and not be able to restart automatically.

I will work on this as soon as I get the chance; I’m going to sleep now (yawn).

Linden Lab make a good point - you probably shouldn’t be typing your passwords into my site, regardless of my promises that I don’t read them (which I don’t).

Then again, they’ve said that several times during AjaxLife’s lifespan, so I assume you all already thought about that.

So, it turns out that this month, against all (my) expectations, donations were actually higher than expenses - hooray!

If donations continue at this rate, AjaxLife’s continued availability is ensured (barring major world-ending incidents and/or the bankruptcy of Amazon.com and/or my death and/or…)

Many thanks to all of you.
Also, even more thanks to the extremely generous French person.

Due to people insistently linking to the IP address AjaxLife redirects to (which changes often, thus breaking any links to it), I have changed the way AjaxLife redirects. Instead of actually redirecting you, it now uses a frame in order to maintain the URL. This means that refreshing whilst logged in won’t work - you’ll be sent back to the login screen.

http://ajaxlife.net/noframes is still frameless, however, should this be necessary.

I’ve worked out why I can’t use AjaxLife at school.

You have attempted to access the following web page:
http://static.ajaxlife.net/AjaxLife.Libs.IE6.js
Access has been blocked because:
Page content filters applied - score = 7576

Since this file contains only prototype.js, scriptaculous and ExtJS, I haven’t a clue why it’s been blocked. It is annoying, however.