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Mastodon Deployed
About two months ago, there was a big buzz that built up around Mastodon, a decentralised social network. I was really busy with the Melbourne Comedy Festival at the time, and didn’t get to take a look. I’ve had a look now, and taken advantage of the recent ChinWag server upgrade and extra resources to…
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Inactive Account Purges
ChinWag is coming up on two years old now, so there are a few “I’ll worry about that later” jobs that I now need to start worrying about. Inactive account handling is one that’ll need to be settled soon. I originally thought about never expiring accounts, simply on the basis that it avoids potential impersonation…
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Swift IM Beta
A great little chat client, Swift, has a new beta of its upcoming 4.0 release available and I’d encourage all ChinWag users to check it out if you’re looking for a reliable and uncomplicated desktop chat client. Version 4 adds support for message carbons, making it easy to switch between multiple desktop or mobile chats…
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Service Outage
Hi everyone, there was a service outage last night of approximately five hours, from 3am to 8am (AEST). This was due to an configuration file error that prevented a restart of Prosody after a scheduled config reload. Human idiocy, basically – the config was not tested after an edit. Apologies to all affected, services have…
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IRC Gateway
On a testing basis, to see if it’s useful to anyone, I’ve enabled an IRC gateway. This allows you to use your XMPP client to connect to an IRC channel as if it were a native multi-user conference. You should be able to join IRC channels on any network by joining a group chat or…
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Moving to Movim
Since I started this little project, one of the main things I’ve been looking for is a decent web interface for chatting. I’ve tested and rejected a lot of things. Some options came really close to being what I wanted but just didn’t seem to have any momentum behind them and stagnated. I wanted to…
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Happy Birthday!
It’s now one whole year since I opened ChinWag to the public. As a result I’ve met some great people, chatted with a bunch of you from all over the world in the Lobby channel, and learned a lot about many topics. I did kind of want to write a more substantial post this week,…
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ChinWag, Privacy and Metadata
It’s now a handful of days until Australia’s new metadata retention laws come into effect, and I just wanted to publish a quick note about how this does and does not affect your usage of ChinWag for messaging, as ChinWag is Australian-hosted and pitched primarily as a provider of services primarily to Australians. Firstly, the focus…
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Simple Chat Room Access
We’re still quite a long way from the slick, integrated experience I’ve got in mind as a long-term goal, but as of now there’s a really simple page you can go to for quick access to the Lobby and any other chat rooms you might want to create or use. Simply head over to https://chinwag.im/webchat/ and sign…
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Welcome to ChinWag
Well, it’s been a fairly long process due to this being not much more than a side project, but ChinWag is a fully functional XMPP service right now. There’s more to come, especially on the web site front-end, but for now I’m considering the site launched, and bless all those who sail in her.
