Thoughts on live chat 
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rpc

 

Faster Customization Changes

We’ve been getting a lot of feedback on hab.la recently and we noticed that many of you thought customization was broken. Customization was working, but had a bit of lag due to some very aggressive (and somewhat poorly designed) caching.

I just pushed out a set of changes to the site that will make customization changes take affect instantly :-).

This fix should also fix the problem where the “One more step to go” message gets shown even after the first step was complete. Only the site operator would see this message, but I am sure it made things seem like they were messed up.

For those of you new to Hab.la, you can customize the messages shown in the Hab.la window as well as the colors and positioning of the Hab.la window in the customize section of your My Hab.la page.

There are a lot of exciting things happening here at Hab.la. Kevin should be blogging about some of his contributions to the excitement soon :-)

Filed under  //   backend   cache   memcache   rpc  
Posted by Olark 

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Optimized RPC server pushed to production

Another boring update for you hab.la fans. We have made some backend tweaks to the RPC server which should slightly speed up Hab.la (for end users) and reduce the amount of memory and CPU used for each site (which will help us better scale hab.la as traffic increases).

We’ve also fixed a few small bugs with operator availability that should speed up the load time for the initial hab.la window.

Hope everyone is having a great New Year

-Ben

Filed under  //   backend   hab.la   jabber   lock   python   rpc   thread  
Posted by Olark 

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I am tired

OK, what is new.

Fixed a few bugs, made some UI tweaks. Nothing too exciting.

I set up a reverse proxy to make the RPC look like it's running on port 80 (in case someone is behind a firewall). It's crazy slow though. So I switched it back for now.

It's almost ready to go for the beta, I think.

EDIT: I think the reverse proxy thing was slow because DNS was broken. Seems snappy enough now.

Filed under  //   dns   javascript   proxy   rpc   tired   ui  
Posted by Olark 

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Inexorable march of progress

The big update for today is opening the Jabber client when a user visits the page, rather than opening it when the user opens a chat box. The advantages boil down to:

  • This greatly simplifies the process of identifying whether an operator is available.
  • Operators can initiate chat with web users.
  • Uhhm .. that's all I've got.

At some point we may want to add some kind of privacy control for web users who do not want operators to initiate chat. Maybe we could have some kind of cookie that prevents hab.la from opening the Jabber session unless you specifically ask it to.

Also, all these Jabber streams may cause a performance issue at some point, but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Filed under  //   performance   privacy   rpc   server  
Posted by Olark 

Comments [0]

Inexorable march of progress

The big update for today is opening the Jabber client when a user visits the page, rather than opening it when the user opens a chat box. The advantages boil down to:

  • This greatly simplifies the process of identifying whether an operator is available.
  • Operators can initiate chat with web users.
  • Uhhm .. that's all I've got.

At some point we may want to add some kind of privacy control for web users who do not want operators to initiate chat. Maybe we could have some kind of cookie that prevents hab.la from opening the Jabber session unless you specifically ask it to.

Also, all these Jabber streams may cause a performance issue at some point, but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Filed under  //   performance   privacy   rpc   server  
Posted by Olark 

Comments [0]