Leaderboard

Recently I was asked to look into creating a "live event" system. Sorta like "status update" but for general news/tweets/articles/etc, that could later be converted into a pages page at the end of the live event. This got me thinking about how live event systems work. To be effective, they have to be able to deliver the information in real time, there are only a handful of ways to do this efficiently. Ajax is simply out of the question in most cases, cause it can be a huge resource hit if more than 20 or so people are actively viewing the live event, so this got me thinking about babble once again. One of the things that set babble apart from other chat systems, was the fact it used websockets to deliver the messages to the connected users instead of relying on ajax to retrieve a list of new messages. this allowed for much faster real time communication, as the message being sent and received were almost instantaneous, with the biggest limiting factor being the connection speed of the user. However, this required special software to achieve. I opted to use node.js to serve as the websocket host. this would've required a separate server for site to run the babble node.js app on or use my service. Both of these required additional resources from both the client and myself, to implement fully. Now as most of you know, I am not some fairly large corporation or even a large or medium or small business, I'm one person, with the resources of 1 person. So running the service for me was a costly endeavor for me. Even if it is more of a pita, the self hosted option is honestly better for everyone involved. Yes self hosting a nodejs server could be more expensive for some, but for most it might actually be cheaper. The servers I had, I had 2 of them at one point, then rolled back to 1 cause of cost for version 3 (but it was a more powerful server than the previous 2 I had). I tried to evenly distribute the cost of the service to the packages for babble (which at the time of the service, I was not making any money on the app itself and the service cost i was mostly in the hole on always). This was cause the size of the server had to be large to handle the load it would have, so more load, more cost, and then more cost to you. So with a self hosted server, you could scale to your needs, i would honestly say most sites would need a very cheap vps from like digital ocean or aws (around $6 to $12 a month). So if I were to bring back Babble, it would also include a live event system in it. I have several ideas to improve it to, one of the ideas i had was a "watch together" type system, that would allow multiple people to watch the same video (say from youtube and the creator of the watch together would have control over the video, like pausing/ff/rewind/etc) and have a chat going among those watching it. If i was to bring back Babble, it would be apart of the subscription model, but it would not have a service attached to it this time. It would strictly be a self hosted thing, I of course would offer a setup service for those who needed it. Let me think, here are some questions to ponder: Should i bring back babble and why. what features would like to see added what changes would you like to see what concerns you'd have with running your own node.js server should alternatives be explored instead of node.js+websockets whatever other question/comment you might have

Decided to release the club's menu i made awhile back but never "officially" released.

Stratagem 3.3.0 has been released under the new subscription model. I've always wanted to do a central app that was required for all my apps, as I use a lot of "shared" libraries in my apps that i've created, that i will fix a bug in one of those and forget to bring it to the other apps or forget where i fixed the bug or when. So this shared app allows me to have only one app that actives the license key and checks on its status when it needs too and also keeps libs i've created to be shared among my apps into one location. This will likely help a great deal with version 5 of IPS, as i have plans on moving over to a framework that plugins into IPS, but use very little IPS code to avoid issues in the future that always plagues me. this should also allow me to more easily move my apps over to other platforms like xenforo and wordpress moving on in the future.

I was hoping to have had at least a beta released before the 4th, but i'm having issues with the license system in nexus. I'll work on it over this weekend and hopefully i will have it up monday