Its been a while since I posted here and this update is definitely long overdue. I basically want to update you with what is going with Mycrocosm now and the near future. As many of you know, Mycrocosm started out as a research project in the first year of my masters at the Media Lab. I have recently graduated so some clarification is in order on the future of the site.

While I believe that it should be up and running for a while to come (in terms of hosting at the Media Lab), Mycrocosm is pretty much a side project for me at this point —actually is has been a side project for a while as my research took a completely different direction a while after launch. There are a few bugs I want to fix (including the front page not refreshing the updated graphs and a bug in the rendering of some line graphs) and I gave the site a bit of a visual refresh to mark the change in status (and for fun — let me know what you think!). But new features may be few and far between as I’ll only get to work on this in my spare time. Let me know if there are broken things that need particular attention and I will do my best to improve them.

I also want to alert you to some upcoming (but unspecified) downtime. The Media Lab is expanding into a new building in the near future and this process will involve some downtime for Mycrocosm as servers are moved and whatnot. Not actually being there anymore means I am not sure exactly when it is going to happen or the logistics of the move. I will keep you updated as best as I can (either via this blog or on twitter). Apologies for the downtime and for the vagueness around it but a number of factors are out of my control (and now out of my direct site), once again thanks for using Mycrocosm.

We have completed our planned downtime and the server is humming along on the new version of Ubuntu . All should be back to normal, though site performance may be a bit slower for a little while as the caches fill up.

Hello All,

Mycrocosm will be undergoing several hours of downtime as we will be performing some server upgrades. It should be starting at around 8PM Eastern Time. As we only run one server the service will be completely unreachable (i.e. no cute fail whale equivalent). But don’t worry it should be back up and running again soon.

Thanks

Yannick

Hello Everyone,

Just posting to let you know that I will be going away on vacation for a few weeks. As mycrocosm’s maintenance is pretty much a one man operation this does mean that I won’t be able to respond to any issues or problems with the site for a little while. Not that I expect that to happen but wanted to mention it in case any one is looking for support (or if something happens to the site). It may also explain why bugs often take a long time to get fixed (apologies, trying my best to balance everything). But thanks everyone for contributing to the site and even commenting on this blog.

See you in the new year.

Yannick

To fill out a survey… Hey all, I will be giving a talk on mycrocosm in early next year and would really appreciate being able to better understand how people are using and responding to mycrocosm (basically i have to do some kind of evaluation of the system – this feeds into the research motivations behind creating mycrocosm). So I have created a brief survey here. Please please please take a few minutes of your time to fill it out. You can also send related comments to mycrocosm@media.mit.edu.

Thanks a lot! Once again the link to the survey.

Check this out. Tim, a Mycrocosm user has written a script to automate updating his graph that displays some email statistics. The script uses the twitter api to mycrocosm. Which does make me reconsider whether I need to continue working on the mycrocosm api any more – in which case i would have to deal with rate limiting and all that – or just let twitter handle that part.

I had also always hoped that the text based syntax in mycrocosm would make it easy to write this kind of stuff without me having to provide a separate api, so I take this as a good sign.

Once again here’s the link to Tim’s mycromail script

Thanks Tim!

Happily, mycrocosm is back up (actually its been up since yesterday afternoon but i hesitated to annouce it as the last time i made an annoucement the switch promptly went down again). It seems that the failure was only tangentially related to the remodelling going on on my floor here at the lab. It turns out that some of the switching equipment seemed to be failing leaving a few servers unreachable and a few people here without internet connections. IT has informed me that we have been moved onto a brand new switch and thus all should be well. Once again apologies for the inconvenience and I hope you continue to enjoy using mycrocosm.

As you may have noticed mycrocosm is not reachable. Sorry for the inconvenience, however it is temporary. Some remoddelling work that was going on in our lab has left a number of our servers disconnected from the internet. The long weekend also meant that I was unable to contact IT at our lab in order to help fix it till today. Hopefully it should be resolved by the end of the day. I will post here again once the problem has been fixed.

Hello,

Mycrocosm now supports data entry via twitter. We are still testing this feature (hence calling it experimental), and you may try it but there may be a few kinks. To do so go to your profile page on mycrocosm and update your profile to include your twitter screen name (user name). Then follow this user -> mycro, after 5 minutes or so mycro should follow you back after which you can send direct messages to that user and have them update your mycrocosm stats. For example you can do “d mycro stuff more”, everything coming after the “d mycro” part should follow standard mycrocosm syntax.

Caveat: My experiments with the twitter api suggests that updates from twitter may not always be timely. The API occasionally lags behind the information visible on the sire (for example it may take way longer than 5 minutes for the twitter api to let me know that you have followed the mycro user). I will be keeping an eye on it over the next little while but it is something that you should be aware of (and my guess is that you probably already are).

So there it is, try it and let me know if it works. These instructions will also be moving to the main mycrocosm help in a few days once i am sure its all working.

Hello. First of all I would like to thank everyone who has tried out Mycrocosm and especially those who have sent feedback or comments, its been a lot of fun watching people put stuff in and make some really interesting graphs (especially after a few months of staring at the same [small] set of graphs during development).

This post is to announce the addition of timezone support to Mycrocosm. I know it has been annoying for those of you tracking times who are not at GMT -5:00. Now you can go to your profile page and set your time zone, with that you should be able to use “now”, “start” and “stop” when working with time graphs.

I have also worked on the ability to embed graphs in other places (something i had planned on doing from the outset when i started working on this), currently it uses an IFrame to link to a page that just shows the graph, its title and its caption. The use if IFrames does allow you to embed a graph and have it update on your site as you change it on Mycrocosm (which we could do with our flash based graphs but not our image based graphs). To use this feature go to the edit page of any of your datasets, there is a new text-field with the code you need to place on your blog or website. I should mention that you cannot embed private datasets offsite.

Feel free to let me know if there are any problems using these features. And feel free to post links to places where you embed your graphs. I would love to see some of these graphs in the context of peoples other online stuff.

Cheers