Another new feature has been added! New message alerts! This feature, like most of them, are available from the options menu. Turning this one on will create a javascript alert informing you that you have a new message as well as who sent it to you.

This can be very, very userful. But also very, very annoying so I'll tell you when it is best to use it and when it is best to have it turned off.

If there is no one on your list online or not away that you are talking with, you can turn Message Alerts on as it will inform you when you have a message. This can help you remember that you have the IM system open as some testers had forgotten when they are doing many things at once. This will help you remember and let you know when someone messages you.

However, unfortunately the IM system will send an alert when everyone messages you so it is possible to get alerts when your Pal LIst refreshes every 10 seconds. That can and most likely WILL become annoying. So it is best to turn it off when you are engaged in one or more constant conversations...when you are least likely to forget that you are using it to begin with.

I have already found this to be very useful.

Now to report on the previous feature that was announced. Timestamping. Currently it seems that each user's offset time is working perfectly. However there are a few hours of each day where either AM is shown when it is really PM and vice versa. So I definitely wouldn't call this feature ready-to-go obviously. But this is a work in progress.

Tonight or tomorrow I would like to post the very first (TADA!) screenshots of various screens from the IM system. Hopefully we'll hear good things about it!

Comment! (3) | Recommend! (1)

Perhaps the last big user-end feature for the Mercury System for Version 1.0 is now beginning the testing stage! Timestamping. I was confused, especially after having been in "away" mode for any length of time, when exactly a particular message was sent to me. Whether it was very recent and they are still waiting for a reply or if it had been from the previous night.

Enter timestamping. This adds the time that the message was sent after your username but before your message. You'll recognize such things from just about any IM system. Hence, reason number two why TMS has it. I am trying to include all features of desktop-based IM systems.

The premise is this: the server has its own time. But chances are the server is in a different geographic location from where you are. Especially with a system like this which could potentially have users from all over the world. So we need to alter the time for each individual user so that the timestamps' time is always relative to their time.

First the program has to turn the server's military time into times that we understand (12 midnight, 12 noon..back to 12 midnight and all over again). Then the script takes your offset (number of hours plus or minus that your time is away from the server's time) and then performs the addition or subtraction to determine what time it is where you are.

There is a new link under the Options menu called Timestamping. There are two drop down menus. The first is for plus/minus where you state whether your time is ahead or behind the server's time. The second has the numbers 1 through 12 so that you can tell the program how many hours your time is from the server's time.

And then it was tricky getting the script to understand if it were AM or PM. But as of now it seems to be working perfectly.

I am asking the testers to keep an eye on this to make certain that the hours are always correct as well as the AM/PM.

TMS is basically 100% in the testing stage as far as the user end goes. While that is all being tested I will work on the administrator controls which will of course will also be kept track of in here.

Comment! (0) | Recommend!

This entry contains upgrades from last night and tonight. I just left a couple of things unfinished last night so i finished them so far this evening and added a couple of others. Some are simply cosmetic and others are pretty essential!

One: authentication. This is the big one. There are mainly three scripts which can be called from within a site if the administrator wants to add full IM functionality to their dynamically created sites. Now of course these scripts need to check to see if the person has access and if they are logged in. We can't have a user that's logged out clicking a link to IM another member of the site and trying to send messages when they had logged out recently and are still "offline" in the system. Now...if someone tries to access one of the windows without a username or password, they will receive an 'unauthorized' error. Any links leading to any of the windows generated by TMS will have a username/password combination sent to the particular window in TMS that they are trying to access.

The scripts will then check to make certain that the username/password combination is actually correct. Incorrect combinations will also result in an 'unauthorized' error.

Secondly: A little thing that I added because it was bothering me was at the terminating tags of the text manipulation buttons when typing up a message. I added a space after the tag so that when you click the terminating tag it will add the tag to the message box but will add a space after it. Initially after making the cursor stay in the message box after a tag is clicked (which was very helpful in saving my sanity when messaging a lot) I still had to hit the space bar every single time and nearly 99% of the times the terminating tag comes at the end of a word and would therefore have a space before the next word. Now the program adds it automatically.

The most expansive work was done on the members list. I wanted to build upon the creation of pages to display the members in less space. I added a line which shows the total number of users that are members of the system. And then to help the user keep track of how many pages they are and where they are in all of the pages, the system now says that you are on "Page 'X' of 'Y'.

I have also gone through and added "Close Window" buttons on quite a few screens that didn't have them. Of course a user can always click the X to close the window but I wanted to go for uniform looks and I didn't want some windows to not have the buttons when most do.

There are a couple of small things I need to fix but the time primarily now is spent on just testing everything. I think that I will need to recruit some more testers. And then move on with site-wide testing to see how the program/server can handle the load. On the bright side, it's been 2 to 3 days since we last received the CPU usage warning! Hopefully that continues. Although it is becoming abundantly clear that if you hope to use this full-scale and for a LOT of members...you should look into a dedicated server where there are very few other people accessing the server because you will see the scripte-generated pages load more slowly. Especially with every window open automatically refreshing every 10 seconds.

Comment! (0) | Recommend!

Tonight I totally recoded the entire Members List script. Not many people had used this but eventually down the line, as the system is used on large sites this will be a necessary feature, so I had to fix something that was bothering me. Initially the Members List was one page that listed all of the members on one page which would have gotten very, very, very (you get the idea) long as more and more members signed up.

So I created a paging system which splits all the members up into chunks of 10 and puts each chunk on one page and then you can click a link to navigate further. Perhaps one of the more challenging parts was that it wasn't sorting alphabetically correctly. But a 2 minute google search located the solution. The script was putting all names that begin with a caps'ed letter before lowercased letters. Such as TheMuffinMan was appearing before blueeyedboy. Which made no sense in the scope of the script because regardless of the case, "b" comes before "t" in the alphabet. So I found out the work around.

Now you can view all of the members in managable chunks on multiple pages. Eventually i will bump it up to atleast 25 members per page but right now it's at 10 to show that it will create multiple pages with the links to other pages automatically being generated.

And there is a new option under the Options menu. It is called Message View. Original message view puts the latest messages in the conversation at the top of the IM window. Normal mode is what you'd see in AIM, Yahoo, etc..where the newest IM's are located at the bottom of the message box. However...most browsers would kick the messages box back to the top each time that the window automatically refreshed or after it refreshed by your sending a message. Then you would have to continue scrolling down after each IM you send or it automatically refreshes with a new post. It could be worth giving it a shot to see if the Normal mode would work for you. But chances are you are best off with the default Original Mode.

Also..so far there have been no CPU usage errors today. So i am still looking into them but it seems to be running smoothly this evening.

That's it for now.

Probably won't have an features/functions added tomorrow as I will be gone until later at night so there will be some more testing going on but most likely no actual work.

Comment! (2) | Recommend!

Last night we had as many members on TMS as we possibly could to this point to see how well it handles all the action. For about 6 or 7 hours it worked like a charm. We had several LONG Instant Message sessions going for many hours. But then we started getting the message that I was dreading seeing all evening long. It states that my accounts CPU limit has been reached. I was able to reload the IM window itself and keep on messaging but the Pal List didn't come back on until after I went to sleep and probably well after that as two of the other members that were on are still logged in even though I know that they're asleep right now hah

This problem is with the server's configuration and how much CPU it allows anything in any particular account to use up. Not that that is a bad thing but it may not happen on all servers that would have The Mercury System hosted on it. But as a programmer you have to expect that it will happen to everyone that runs it. I want to contact the company and see exactly how much memory has to be used up before this message appears and then try to see what in the script is causing this to happen. It may lead to a complete rewrite of the Pal List script to see where it is eating up all of the CPU memory.

Will report back later with any findings.

Comment! (4) | Recommend!

Only added one completely new feature this evening. If you login to The Mercury System you will notice a red circular button with a white "X". This will clear the current conversation with that Pal. This is the equivalent of simply X'ing out a window in a traditional desktop IM client. You can close IM windows in TMS but the conversation will still be there when you reopen the window. The clear button allows you to clear out the entire previous conversation.

There is the potential for a verification step to be added to make certain that you do not accidentally click that icon. But as for you now you click that button to clear out the IM conversation.

We ran into one of the biggest and possibly most important errors that could be generated by use of The Mercury System. But it's where the server is conserned. All testers received a message stating that the program had used up over the allocated amount of CPU that can be used up by my account in a very small amount of time. Now this is weird because there was only one or two conversations going on and we've had much more than that on other nights without any kind of problem. So now I have to look deeply into this. I am also thinking over ways to optimize everything even further to try to keep these problems from occuring on other peoples' systems after they start using TMS. But it has me slightly worried with only two active users on.

I will have to check my server's error logs and try to find out exactly what happened. But I plan to spend a lot of time on the optimization to see if we can keep that message from every coming back.

That's it for this past evening.

Comment! (3) | Recommend!