Still Alive

Just a quick update to confirm that I’m still very much alive despite my lack of blogging action over the past week or so.

IPB 2.1 is wrapping up nicely. All the features are in (even one IPB 3.0 “feature”) and we’re all set for the first RC later this week. I moved the IPS Chat stuff into the components framework today which cleans up some of the code and allows for a more accurate Who’s Chatting list. I ended up adding an AJAX ping to update who is active in the chat section of the board. I couldn’t rely on the session table because most people open chat in one window and surf around the board in another which would instantly remove them from the chatting list. I can’t rely on the applet generated list either as it has trouble handling non alphanumerics which makes a nonsense of the list.

I opted for a separate serialized array in the cache list (the components framework allows you to select which caches are loaded at run time) so that saves a query right away. This array is updated every 60 seconds by an AJAX ping. During the update all members who’ve not pinged within 2 minutes are removed (assuming they’ve since closed the window, etc).

This seems to work pretty well and is more efficient – and best of all – uses an existing framework.

Result.