Apparently I do, and seeing as WordPress sites still integrate quite a bit with it I decided to set one back up.
Of course, the most popular use of Gravatar was just for having a consistent internet presence across multiple, even independent sites (unfortunately social media won out in that respect), but it also had a pretty competent profile system. You can still see Matt Mullenweg’s here.
I did run into some issues, though. Unfortunately, YouTube linking was broken, Flickr linking was no longer there, and I could only add site domains so adding the Patio itself as a website was a no-go.
AIM was still listed as a contact option but not MSN, and it’s not possible to add your own fields.
Oddly enough they actually do have options for adding Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin addresses to your account, so someone out there must be updating this site, right..?
Despite the lacking number of services to pair it with now and the weird little quirks I’ve had with it, I still quite like Gravatar’s profiles and if it had some more services to link to (namely GitHub, Flickr, and fixed YouTube, custom fields would be nice as well), I could consider mine complete. With its option for adding photos to your profile, it reminded me of the old MSN contact cards which looked quite comfy as well.
P.S. Hover on my Gravatar below, I got hovercards set up.
Turns out the MSN itch never stops. I came across this thread on the MessengerGeek forums, which pointed toward ProxHTTPSProxy, a program that seems to fix many issues with Escargot and HTTPS sites in general on XP. I believe it’s a bit like WebOne in how you use it; except, that it runs locally, and still lets you use http:// urls as normal instead of serving as an http:// proxy.
Once that was set up, there was another change I needed to make in order for it to connect to my running server instance (which, with how I have it configured in VirtualBox, is the IP 10.0.2.2, as it’s referred to in my HOSTS file), and that was to make the proxy skip verifying certificates for those domains.
(I don’t believe this would be required outside of development when pre-patched installers come out.)
It was then when WLM could finally connect without spouting 80048862 or 80048820 errors, which for me was great to see, if only because I had never seen XP work right with Escargot in person before. To see 2009 will work on XP on release, while it probably shouldn’t be a surprise, is quite the relief. (And it also means I’ll be able to get Escargot 8.5 set up now on my own personal “XP machine”, a 2011 ThinkCentre Edge, in case I start using that full-time; part-time even.)
And honestly I’m quite excited about just how compatible 2009 looks to be with the utilities I use with WLM 8.5 now, with Messenger Plus! of course being available, and Craftplacer’s Messenger Activity Monitor (and other Messenger .NET-based projects) working just as well. Basically all of what I like so much about 8.5 is still gonna be here, like file transfers, handwriting and the mess.be games, and while I probably shouldn’t be surprised by it all still being here, as far as I can tell 2009 is mainly just more of what I like about MSN and I’m thrilled for that.
I’ll still need to contain that excitement as support isn’t out yet, but Soon™. Soon™ for sure.
I got Escargot‘s current development server working on my current machine with Windows Live Messenger 2009 support, and it’s looking very exciting so far.
I haven’t gotten it to work under a Windows XP guest, due to this error:
Exception ignored in: <function DevTLS.create_ssl_context.<locals>.servername_callback at 0x000001C9DCFDE510>
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\Eric\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\devtls\impl.py", line 26, in servername_callback
p_crt, p_key = self._get_or_create_cert(domain)
File "C:\Users\Eric\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\devtls\impl.py", line 43, in _get_or_create_cert
crt, key = self._create_cert(domain)
File "C:\Users\Eric\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\devtls\impl.py", line 52, in _create_cert
csr = crypto_util.create_csr(key, domain = domain)
File "C:\Users\Eric\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\devtls\crypto_util.py", line 23, in create_csr
raise ValueError("either `common_name` or `domain` required")
ValueError: either `common_name` or `domain` required
XP’s always been kind of weird with Escargot, due to stuff with SSL, TLS and whatnot. I’ve fiddled with around with those settings in Internet Options to no avail. I imagine someone will likely figure something out come release.
I also played around with the Yahoo! Messenger frontend which works pretty well, all things considered. Seeing both of them communicating with each other is pretty sweet.
Neither WLM or YMSG support is available yet; gonna ask on behalf on the people working on it not to have them rush it. That being said, it seems there are just a few things before it’s production-ready and it really looks to be right around the corner.
Some big news today:
- One of my earliest true projects, PhotoPage is now open-sourced for posterity. http://github.com/dotcomboom/PhotoPage
- I have been making preparations for v4. For the time being, all current site content is going to be at /web/dcb_v4/archives/v3. Here’s a preview of what’s to come:
- The Patio is back on Twenty Ten. Just such a comfy theme.