Hypergrid Destination Checker is up

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As everyone who has ever tried to set up a hyperport well knows, hypergrid destinations change frequently. Regions move, grids close — staying up to date can be a nightmare. Especially if you’re doing it all by hand.

To help people out, and to avoid unnecessary duplication of work, I’ve set up an in-world script that checks the 700-plus destinations I currently have in my database to see if they are up or not, and posts this result to an online database.

This tool can only check hypergrid-enabled grids and destinations. It takes about 40 minutes to check all 700 locations, and I plan to run it twice a day, or so, on an automated off-set cycle so that over the course of the month all destinations are checked at various parts of the day.

I also have a new assistant, Tyler Brabo, creating listings for all the destinations that don’t have descriptions and snapshots yet. If you have a destination that’s not in the Hyperica directory yet, you can add it yourself by filling out this form, or emailing Tyler Brabo.

To check the uptime of any particular region, enter the following URL:

http://hg-url-status-checker-1.appspot.com/get?hgurl=hg.osgrid.org:80

The last part of the URL is the hypergrid address — change that to whatever destination you want to check.

The results look like this:

HG URL: hg.osgrid.org:80
Last checked: Apr 06, 2015
Last status: up
Percent uptime: 100.0%

The percent uptime refers to the how often, during the previous 30 days, the destination was up. Since I just started the tool running today, all the results should be either 0 percent or 100 percent. The percent uptime is for people who want to showcase destinations that are up all the time more prominently than ones that are only up part-time.

I’m sharing the results here because there’s no point in having everybody pinging every region all the time — it would just slow down the regions.

Meanwhile, for those who are interested in grabbing a full list of the hypergrid addresses in Hyperica, you can get it here.  And here is the list of the 700 or so destinations I checked today, and their status.

Gates to the most popular grids, on Hyperica.
Gates to the most popular grids, on Hyperica.

And speaking of Hyperica, the scripts on the main gates have been updated and seem to be working, thanks to Lisa Laxton of Laxton Consulting. If anyone cares to teleport in to Hyperica at hg.hyperica.com:8022 and walk through these gates, I’d appreciate the testing.

The gates go to the most popular hypergrid-enabled grids, based on latest traffic numbers.

After these gates are tested, I’ll set up the rest of the gates, with the idea of grouping them into shopping, education, and venue categories. There’s also an “adults only” gate area, accessible via a secret door.

I’d like to add that the reason I was able to hire Lisa Laxton, Tyler Brabo and Google App Engine database developer Yannick Cohen was thanks to the support of our advertisers — you can see their ads in the sidebar at right. The advertisers are also the reason why Hypergrid Business has been loading faster lately, since I was able to upgrade its hosting.

Thank you very much for your support!

All the scripts were created under a CC0 license. The updated hypergate script is here. The zip file for the Google App Engine project is here.

I can easily see the Google App Engine project being adapted to serve as a back-end system for roleplaying games, or a guestbook, or long-term storage for any kind of data you need to save from an in-world script. Best of all, the Google App Engine is free for light use, and pretty low cost as you scale up.

If you don’t know this platform, you can hire Yannick Cohen to set up the Google App Engine project for you. Since he’s already done this once, he’ll know exactly what you’re looking for and he can do very quickly. He was great to work with, and I recommend him highly. I also recommend Lisa Laxton for in-world coding work — she really knows her way around OSSL and is a high-powered developer in real life — and Tyler Brabo for in-world research.

My inspiration for the Google App Engine project was the Grid URL Persister by Latif Khalifa,

Here is my script that checks the status of destinations and loads them into the Google App Engine database, for your reference only. Please do not use this script as is! You’ll mess up my database. I’ve commented out the key lines, just in case. If you build your own database on the Google App Engine then just adapt my script to point to your project, instead of mine.

Maria Korolov
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