Slow and Steady

It's been four days since my last post...let me catch you up on what I've been doing and where things are in regards to a site update.

First of all, it's been a busy week at my day job. Couple that with training for my third Chicago Marathon in the evenings after work in heat that has been in the 90+ degree range with dreadful amounts of humidity and what do you get? You get an extremely tired developer who is not getting home to eat dinner until 8 or 9pm every night. Translation: Work on the site has been a bit slow this week. However, just because it is slow does not mean that it is not happening.

Like they say to novice marathoners: Slow and steady will get you to the finish line.

I've been working an hour here and an hour there...basically whenever I can. When I'm out doing my training runs, I'm working. I'm thinking through logic and trying to figure out solutions for features that I want to put in as well as suggestions that I've received from the community. When I get home, I try to build a bit of code. Add another function or start another page. And I'm happy to say that it has been paying off.

I'm in the final stages of testing the long-awaited "Add a site to onXiam" functionality. I've tried to simplify the process as much as I possibly could. Instead of asking you, the end user, to do complex thinking, I've tried to encapsulate all of that complexity on the backend as much as I can. I won't lie...It has not been easy, but I feel that the result is pretty straightforward. I've managed to make it almost the same as the current "add an identity" page. I just need you to give a little bit more info in order to make the site available to everyone. Once the page gets launched, I'll be happy to hear your thoughts about it, and if I can improve it in any way, I will.

It still needs just a bit more testing, but it is close. Look for it this weekend for sure.

This Just In: 300 and Counting!

This afternoon, BrainSyke joined the onXiam community. And that was all it took to hit the 300 user mark.

Welcome, BrainSyke. Glad to have you here.

It's great to see the train keep rollin'. I know that you have all been spreading the word about onXiam via blog links and sidebar badges. Thank you so much! The more people that join up, the more connections we can make, and the more communities we can all discover.

Weekend Update - The Good and the Bad

Somehow during a weekend of 75-90 degree days, I managed to find the time to get to work on some of the new features that are on my list for onXiam. After many hours of struggling with some stupid mistakes (you know, the ones that are staring you right in the face and you still don't see them), I finally had the site stable again with a long overdue new feature: static URLs!

That's right. Instead of my profile page being http://www.onxiam.com/user.aspx?kevinkmp, now it is http://www.onxiam.com/people/kevinkmp/. As you can see from the first link, the old way still works, but yes, now you can have a nice clean URL for your homepage on onXiam. I know that this should not be a difficult thing to implement, but let me just say this: When using asp.net on a shared webhost, it is incredibly difficult. But alas, that is all in the past, for now let us all celebrate with joy and marvel at the beautiful new URLs. Please. Celebrate. Now!

While I was working on this feature, I put up a message in the header section of all pages explaining that I was promoting code. I'll continue to do that in the future as well. For the most part, the site will remain functional, but there will be times when I have to do a hard IIS reset, so if you happen to be logged in at that moment, you'll get bumped out to the login screen once the reset takes place. Sorry about that, but these little annoyances come hand-in-hand with new features.

One thing that I feel really bad about is that due to the URL stuff taking much longer than I anticipated, I did not get the "add a site" page up and running like I had said I would. I am really sorry, but I just ran out of time. However, that is priority #1 as of right now, and it will be up ASAP.

But for now, please enjoy the brand spankin' new URLs.

More New Sites Added

I've added some more sites at the suggestion of you readers. Thanks for pointing these out and asking for them to get added.

And fear not! The first enhancement to be rolled out will be a page that lets you add sites yourself. Look for it this weekend.

All the most recently added sites can be seen on the latest page, but since you're here already, I'll just mention the 10 most recent:

• Blip.tv
• Jobster
• MyBlogLog - Communities
• StumbleUpon
• PodNova
• Cite U Like
• Electric Minds (cool logo!)
• Guild Wars
• Freenode
• Efnet

Back At Ya!

I just wanted to take a minute to say thanks to some of you who have been spreading the word about onXiam.

• Briconcella was the first to write about onXiam on the Tech Bee blog
• Tmarkelz gave me a shout over on 360voice - the original video game blogject! Accept no substitutes!!!
• Eauxpie informed the SecondLife crew about onXiam, resulting in Torley posting this which then led to Ruggedmug making this awesome post!
• Ramen Junkie had some nice words to say on his blog

I keep discovering more comments and links all the time, so I just wanted to publicly thank you all for helping to spread the word.

Two Hundred and Counting

The last couple days have seen a steady stream of people joining onXiam. Earlier today we hit number 200 when hangry signed up.

Unfortunately in the midst of this excitement, I've also found myself busy for every single minute of the last few days. I would like nothing more than to sit down for a few hours and finish up some updates for the site, but my life is just not cooporating at the moment. Things should free up a bit by this weekend, so I plan on attacking some development at that time.

Thanks to all who have joined -- it seems that you have all been spreading the word. I appreciate it!

The Big 1-0-0

When Chadrick clicked that "Sign Me Up!" button, he became the 100th member of the onXiam community.

Welcome, Chadrick.

And welcome to everyone else too! I hope you are able to make some interesting connections using onXiam.

Second Life Influx?

So all of a sudden I am seeing an influx of Second Life people joining the onXiam community!

One new member after another is showing up on the latest page, and most if not all of them seem to be somehow tied to Second Life. For instance, new member Eauxpie is "Richard Linden" in Second Life. Eauxpie, I'm singling you out because it seems like you were the first one to start this rush! Can I ask where you found out about onXiam?

So welcome to all of the new people who share the revered Linden name in Second Life! Thank you for spreading the word!

I hope you like onXiam. There are more cool things to come.

-Kevin

onXiam On Digg

It looks like onXiam user ldmorris426 liked onXiam enough to submit it to Digg. Currently the story/link has been dugg 4 times. If you like onXiam too, then go digg it to boost visibility.

Thank you ldmorris426 for the submission!

A Special Welcome To: Gleeb Torin!

I wanted to extend a special welcome to new onXiam user Gleeb Torin. Why? Well, in addition to using onXiam to track down another onXiam user in SecondLife, he is also the first person to enter an identity in his profile for Nintendo DS Animal Crossing, and I just thought that was pretty neat!

So if you play Animal Crossing, be sure to look Gleeb up!

On a somewhat related sidenote, I have to admit that I am surprised that there are still no World of Warcraft identities listed! I don't play WoW, but I know how huge it is and I thought that I would have seen a few WoW identities by now. What gives?

Discovering Connections via onXiam

This is great! Over the weekend I received an email from onXiam user tmarkelz which read:

"Ha ha... social networking in action... contacted via SecondLife via onXiam via 360voice."

He then pasted the text of an IM that he received inside of SecondLife from onXiam user Gleeb Torin:

"found you on onXiam.com, via 360voice... I look forward to the next community night, that last was a blast :D"

What does that mean? As I wrote the other day, Trapper wrote on the 360voice dev blog about 360voice being included in onXiam. That exposure resulted in a steady stream of readers of that blog joining onXiam. New onXiam user Gleeb Torin apparantly read about onXiam in the 360voice blog, signed up, then saw in Trapper's profile that he has a SecondLife persona and contacted him inside of SecondLife!

It is so exciting to hear about connections like this being made! This is just what I had in mind when I conceived this site. Scenarios like "hey, this person looks interesting...I wonder what else (s)he does online..." Well now you can find out!

Thank You 360Voice!

My friend Trapper is one of the guys behind 360Voice. He was kind enough to give a shoutout to onXiam over on the 360Voice dev blog. I wanted to say thanks to him for doing that because it definitely helped to raise the visibility of onXiam to a wider audience.

Since he made the post talking about onXiam, I have had more than 20 new people sign up to consolidate their online identities via onXiam. It's really fun to check the latest page and see new names every time!

Now I just need to get some more exposure via del.icio.us, digg, bloglinks...and don't forget about the badges! I'll work on getting some more badges ready soon too.

New Sites Added

I've added a bunch of new sites to the onXiam collection. In order to keep people better appraised of when new sites get added, I decided to add a section to the Latest page featuring the 20 most recent sites that have been added. Of course, this has also been enabled as a feed in case you want to monitor what new sites get added.

I realized as I put this together that watching this feed would be beneficial for two reasons:

1. You see a site name and say "Hey, I participate in that community! I'm going to add it to my profile!"
2. You see a site name and say "Hmm...I've never even heard of that before. I wonder what it is? I'm going to go check it out..."

As I was building this initial version of onXiam, I was amazed at just how many communities there are online. Not surprised, just amazed. I feel like I am pretty active online, but I feel like a hermit when I see the myriad of communities that are available! Hopefully onXiam will have a positive impact on that front as well.

Organize your identities and at the same time, discover new communities in which you are interested.

Identities on MSN

I just fielded a request from tijir asking to get MSN added as a site. Being the happy-to-respond-quickly guy that I am, I started looking to gather the necessary info in order to add MSN, and I'm running into a few questions.

MSN provides so many services...are they all tied together under a unified identity? I know that is what their Passport service is for, but I ask this because while I do have a Passport account (I log into Passport with my Hotmail address), I don't use MSN messenger and I don't have an MSN Spaces page.

Does anyone out there know if your Hotmail name is the same as your Passport name is the same as your MSN Messenger name...and so on?

Thanks for the help - and to those of you who also asked for more specific sites to be added, they are on the way. Man, I really have to get that "add a site yourself" page built ASAP! :)

Back in Chicago

Hello everyone.

I just wanted to say that after attending Supernova 2006 and driving cross country with my girlfriend I am now back in Chicago.

Work on the site may continue to be a bit slow due to unpacking boxes -- the cross country drive was part of moving my girlfriend from SF to Chicago, so we have some unpacking and things like that to do. I've been giving a lot of thought to what things need improving and what things I should add first, so I think that I have a good direction in mind.

I'll certainly announce all updates and enhancements that I make to the site here. Thanks for sticking with me and allowing me some time off so soon after launch! Hopefully the best is yet to come!

-Kevin