Hello fellow dev-heads, it has been a while since we updated this blog and a lot has happened since the last post. Our site and the Myxer platform are growing at a great pace and we are feverishly adding new features and functions to support the growing demand for our services. All good news!

Our APIs have also had some work done to them to make it easier to deliver content to mobiles phones. I’m excited to announce that we have introduced a new API which allows partners to send their content directly to the phone without needed to go to myxer.com to finish the delivery. This is great news for partners that want a clean user experience with total control of where the user goes on their site. With more control comes more responsibility for partner sites. There are some new guidelines on how to use it.

Another change in our platform is that we now use categories instead of genres. This is to make it easier for users to find the music they like. Genres are still supported for backward compatibility but we recommend you start using the categories on our site for better results on searches.

Last thing I wanted to mention was that we have updated our .NET and PHP client libraries to support the latest APIs changes. If you have not done so, I highly recommend downloading these libraries and using them when integrating with Myxer – they are quite the time-savers.

Until next time, good luck and happy Mobilizing!

API method call wrappers have been added for wallpapers and videos. Be aware, however, that currently only MyxerIndie profiles can add video content. All content manipulation methods use a common method that takes care of printing debug messages and calling lower level functionality to sign, build, and send requests. Uncommon parameters are passed to Myxer->ContentCreate() as the last argument. Now that boolean values can be sent, I also had to make sure bools are encoded in the query string and the data string that gets signed correctly.

If you’re a PHP developer and have an API key from us to integrate the Myxer platform into your website, you will find this open source project useful: https://sourceforge.net/projects/myxerapi-php5 It saves you the trouble of having to do the communication work to talk with our public API. Just provide your API key and secret and you can manage content and profiles from your own server-side code. It has recently been updated to use the new API method calls (myxer.*.*) and has cleaner function names now. More features will be coming in the future. Contact us if you have made your own improvements and want to commit your changes to the SourceForge repository.

It seems our hosting facility (very expensive hosting facility, let me add) screwed us up yesterday when a typo in a maintenance script started a chain reaction of failures that has led to some unavailability of Myxer services. None of our physical web, database, or file servers were directly affected, rather it’s that the internet addressing and routing systems that allow your web browser (or your phone’s) to reach our servers were misconfigured.

The details of how this mistake worked its way through our infrastructure are gritty, but the end result is that:

1. The MyxerTones.com website was unavailable for approximately two hours yesterday morning (8/15/06, 6-8AM ET) . We discovered this fairly quickly (you think?) and were able to reconfigure to repair all requests for myxertones.com.
2. During the MyxerTones.com downtime, MyxerTags placed on websites around the world were “dark.” The alternate text was displayed during this time (”Send this ringtone to your phone…”), but attempts to activate MyxerTags would have failed. Similarly, any of our partners using our APIs or data feeds would have experienced failures during that time. At this point, MyxerTags and all other Myxer services are accessible and functioning correctly.
3. Download links sent anytime before about 11PM ET last night (Wednesday, 8/15) do not currently work. If you resend any ringtone you’ve made in the past, you will be sent a new SMS message with a functioning link. But if you follow an old link, you’ll either see a “not found” or “404″ message, or you might actually see an “under construction” page (which isn’t even ours!). [Note: we're expecting the old links to start working again for most users within a couple of hours, so when you read this the problem will likely already be fixed.]

A lot of websites don’t have a big problem with going offline for a couple of hours every month or so for maintenance, but we do. Our website is built on the Myxer platform, which is relied on by our partners around the world to deliver something like two or three ringtones every second of every day, so you can imagine how pissed off we are for enduring this downtime. As we strive to make Myxer synonymous with “radically simplified mobile”, any downtime for our website or our partners is unacceptable.

Having identified and corrected this specific problem, we will now be spending some time re-evaluating our hosting environment and plans for future growth. Despite the fact that we spend a lot of time having fun with our website and technology, we are seriously committed to delivering worldclass service whether you’re trying to download a single ringtone to your own phone, or you’re integrated with our platform to mobilize your entire catalog.

Myk (with CTO hat on)

http://www.myxertones.com/Feeds/search.aspx, once in production, will provide developers the ability to search our catalog based on a search string, genre, profanity filter, and content type. Here are the parameters (required in bold):

• search
  • any string
• genre
  • classical
  • hiphop
  • poprock
  • country
  • latin
  • gospel
  • dance
  • blues
  • comedy
  • other

  type

  • ringtone
  • wallpaper
  • video
  • song

  filter

  • none
  • hideoffensive

An invalid parameter value will default to not filtering by that parameter at all except in the case of filter which will hide offensive content by default.

The Biography, Hometown, and Url fields are available in the Profile class now to interface with the respective parameters on the server side.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/myxerapi-aspnet/

Welcome to MyxerDev, the blog dedicated to the Myxer developer community. While we have yet to officially bless the official 1.0 release of our APIs and other services, we’ve already seen the launch of a lot of really cool website integrations and mashups of one sort or another that integrate Myxer’s mobile content platform. It’s a really exciting time for us, because we’ve been building the guts of this platform for a long time, and we’re finally at the point where sites other than MyxerTones.com are taking advantage of it.

Early adopters of Myxer Services have included:

• bandVillage. Our new friend Peter integrated his PHP-based music portal with Myxer using the MyxerAPIs, allowing all of his bands to offer ringtones and wallpapers for sale right from his website.
• Ringtones08.com. Jo and crew put together this politically-themed website that allows users to submit their own ringtones related to the ‘08 elections. What’s notable is that the site integrates seamlessly with Myxer despite being implemented entirely in client-side technologies (HTML and a touch of JavaScript). It takes advantage of MyxerFeeds to make this possible.

Our goal for Myxer Services is simple. Through our publicly-available interface, we will establish the already battle-hardened Myxer mobile content platform as the de facto standard for the creation, management, and provisioning of mobile content. From ringtones to videos to text messaging campaigns, we are committed to providing the absolute best way to mobilize your stuff.

We’ve spent the past two years insuring the system is powerful and scalable — it’s currently delivering more than two ringtones, wallpapers, songs, and videos every second of every day. And now, we’re focused on putting that power in the hands of every web developer on the planet, so that anyone can add mobile functionality to their own website, or build entirely new mobile products/services, that previously could only done through painstaking business arrangements with carriers, aggregators, and other shady and nefarious types.

So while today we’re still officially in “pre-release” mode, you’ll find the MyxerAPIs are already fairly well documented and fully-functional right now. Enhanced documentation, more examples, and a whole slew of new functionality is just around the corner, so keep your eye on this space!

Myk

myxer.profile.create and myxer.profile.update optionally support the parameters biography, url (undergoes validation, prefixing http:// if it isn’t already there), file (profile image), and hometown so that partner sites don’t create such barren artist profiles.

Existing parameters have become more strict, too. For example, profile names can not contain profanity nor can they be empty.

The following API methods have been renamed and the changes will be in production at the time of the next build:

myxer.profile.image => myxer.profile.setImage
myxer.ringtone.image => myxer.ringtone.setImage
myxer.video.image => myxer.video.setImage
myxer.song.image => myxer.song.setImage

Welcome to the Myxer™ Developer’s blog.