FindMeOn.com Blog

Phase 1 of our OpenID integration is about to launch…

All public records on FindMeOn.com ( the /user/ and /findmeon/ directories ) are now ususable as OpenID ‘Urls’. They also all point to the http://openid.findmeon.com server.

The OpenID server is used to handle all logins and simple-registration. Right now, it requires a seperate login — but it does use the same email/password as your FindMeOn.com login, as well as account information from your FindMeOn.com profile.

The service also uses abstracted FindMeOn.com identitifiers — so each account you list with FindMeOn.com has its own identity URL. Everything uses the same login/password and profile description — but this approach keeps your identitiy urls shielded from one another.

Within the next week Phase2 will launch - which is mostly our own extensions to the OpenID protocol.

FindMeOn.com plans on offering mulitiple login/identity services for its users. OpenID is just the first implementation.

A fieldname typo resulted in the “Current Location” of OpenSN profiles to not be auto-filled on updates. That has been fixed.

Shouts have been bumped up to 200 characters, which is the max available screensize on the the Interactive badge. Some clipping may happen when flash justifies text. To get around that, a scroller will be introduced ( and text may go up to 300 chars )

There’s a major update being worked on right now. Its very hush-hush, but I think many people will be excited by it !

//Jonathan

I originally thought that CrossSiteVisits (under the stats section) would be receiving the largest number data.

I was dead wrong.

Identity record views are getting massive hits across the board- about a 20:1 ratio between their use and cross site visits.

Upcoming versions of the stats system will definitely take this into account.

The bulk of the the temporary UI improvements are now in effect.

There are 3 big changes:
1- 90% of pages now fit within 800px wide.
2- Some ’steps’ and ‘icons’ are being used in confusing portions of the site.
3- The site now has a preliminary color scheme.

The scheme will undoubtedly change during redesigns and upgrades. But for now, here’s the color code:
viewing a public findmeon record
light blue
viewing a public user record
light green
security alerts
red
account stuff
orange
search
green
corporate stuff
yellow

I pushed an update live @5am, and at 11am woke up to find that it broke the search function ( the page wasn’t in svn somehow ).

Search is back. More updates on the way.

After listening to lots of constructive feedback, we’ve been plugging away at the problem areas.

There’s going to be a pretty decent UI update within the next day ( the /user and /findmeon sections have already been upgraded a bit )

This isn’t an official / big upgrade — we’re still working on getting resources to bring an expert in. This is more like the first of a long series of ‘band-aids’.

I just updated the server - 20 second of downtime. I hope no one got mad.

The upgrade procedure is pretty stupid: modperl goes down, a barebones ‘be back shortly’ goes up, the servers sync, and modperl is replaced.

What should happen is this: modperl-2 goes up, nginx gracefully reloads to proxy content from modperl to modperl-2, modperl goes down. the end.

unfortunately, i need to figure out a way to do that and not have the system serve js/imgs from one version to another. so this update procedure will painfully be around a bit longer.

So anyways, the updates (nothing exciting):
- The ‘public’ facing pages just got reskinned to be 800px wide. They’re a bit better laid out too.
- Fixed a bug that caused a Critical Error when trying to create OpenSN profiles
- Fixed a bug that caused friendships to not display correctly on page views.

There’s an update with the verification history that will go live sometime later tonight. I’m a bit unhappy with the display, so I’m trying to fix that up.

What was exciting about the updates, is that the behind-the-scenes changes to force the updating required a bunch of upgrades that were in the queue for from the RoadSound system (RS and FMO use the same backend). I cleared 11 internal tickets — woo hoo.