Admin site tweaks; HTTPS widgets; and Meebo/Adium news

Gosh, it's been a long time since our last blog post! This Fall, we were kept pretty busy with growing the system to keep pace with all-time-high levels of usage. We're happy that those efforts have been successful and things are currently stable and scale well. Several news items:

• Over the holidays, we pushed out an updated version of the Admin site. The main user-visible change is that now, you can resize the upper and lower panes in the Users, Queues, and Gateways panel. Previously, longer lists of gateways could be cut off on netbooks and lower-resolution wide screen displays. This should no longer be an issue. Long lists of users are also easier to manage, and the drag-and-drop functionality in Tree View is improved. Behind the scenes, the admin site underwent major code changes that make it easier to manage and update. Please let us know if you find bugs.
• By popular request over on the group, secure widgets are working now, so anyone looking to integrate an embedded widget in a secure site (such as Illiad) should no longer be thwarted by mixed-content warnings in Internet Explorer.
• Now, the less-good news. As hopefully everyone knows, recent versions of Pidgin no longer implement a part of the XMPP specification we need in order to properly end chats. We will eventually have a plugin to fix this problem in Pidgin. Additionally, the problem recently spread to Meebo, since it uses libpurple, the core part of Pidgin. Sadly, Meebo really is not a good choice for staffing LibraryH3lp queues at this time. In better news, we already have a handle on a solution that should allow Meebo and any Jabber client, even those that don't implement the needed chat state notification, to be suitable for monitoring queues. We'll update here when that is available. This problem will also spread to Adium when they publicly release version 1.4, so please do not upgrade to that version until we have our new solution in place. [edited 1/10/2010 because the upgraded routing is in place now, and all XMPP clients can now be used.]
• [edited 1/1/2010 to clarify: Meebo Me gateways still work fine. The problem is with using the meebo.com website as the librarians' client for staffing the service.]

We wish you all a very happy New Year!