Welcome to mimir.ik.nu

The server mag.ik.nu that hosts the Mimír service will be physically moved to another co-location facility during the coming night (CET). Therefore the server will be powered down at 22:30 UTC. It should be back up in a couple of hours after that.

The last couple of weeks, the Mimír backend has seen some architectural changes, that make them even more Twisted. For example the XMPP protocol handling was abstracted out of the main item handling code, while the latter have become proper Twisted services.

The changes have made it possible to change the interchange format between the aggregator and news bot to Atom entries, conforming to Atom over XMPP. There are still some loose ends, but you can already view more information about news items that appear on your personal news page. Examples include: published and updated dates, author, tags and enclosures.

Be sure to reload the page if it looks funky, as there have been some stylesheet changes. The layout is not final, so suggestions are welcome.

Since the last update 49 new channels have been added, so be sure to check your channels page.

As of today, there are no Perl components in Mimír any longer. A few months ago the aggregator got replaced and just now the replacement for the last component, the news bot, went online, too. Both are brand new Python implementations written using the Twisted framework. There might have been some hickups, but that should be fixed now. Coincidently there have been reports of item duplicates, most recently for the slashdot channel. These were caused by a change in URL usage in their feeds. Work is underway to avoid such duplicates, so you won't be bothered by them.

Another new thing you might have noticed is favicon that looks like a guy reading a news paper. A larger rendering is now made into a Mimír's logo as you can see on the Mimír site as of now. The guy was contributed by Intosi.

As a result of a Perl upgrade, and all depending packages, the aggregator of Mimír is acting up and has to be run manually for each update. I'm in the process of writing a new one based on Twisted and Feedparser. Please, bare with me while I'm trying to fix this!

As of last week, there is comprehensive Mimír User Manual to enable you to get the most out of Mimír. It offers an explanation of all features and preference settings, along with a number of screenshots. You don't have to log in to the site to access the manual, so other's can also see what Mimír is all about.

Since last time I mentioned new channels, 64 new channels have been added. Among them a number of Jabber related blogs, a few Planets and a fair number of requested channels. One of the new Jabber blogs, by Thomas Muldowney (temas), was removed again because, unfortunately, he decided to stop blogging.

I updated the Mimír Preferences page with some new preferences.

Upon request, Mimír is now available via SSL at https://mimir.ik.nu/. Because you will occasionally get messages to remind you of unread news items with a link to your news page, there is a new preference to select if you want have that link point to the SSL version or not.

Further, as you might know, Mimír sends you messages depending on your current presence. The set of presences for which you will receive messages, has been stored in the database from the very beginning, but there was no way to alter this set yourself. I modified the preference page to accomodate for this. The default is that 'online' and 'chat' are selected.

Last but not least, you can now change your password, if desired.