Cobs' Windows Live Spaces Dev Blog

Never thought I'd be writing this but hey here we are.

The Tour button on the homepage linked to a domain that was no longer registered. Previously it just had advertisements and stuff when Microsoft didn't own it.

I just bought the domain..... time to get the tour going I guess.

So I managed to get a full list of the themes that archive.org has stored away. They're not all complete sadly, some are missing a few resources which I have from other themes, some are missing everything (such as distinct backgrounds).

Great news right? Well, sort of.

Each theme at fastest takes about 20 minutes to recreate........ there's 178 themes left according to the list I have created.... lets do some quick maths, 20 minutes times 178 themes is 3560 minutes, divide by 60 minutes and we have 59.33333 hours.....that's gonna be a lot of hours recreating themes. 2 and a half days to be specific.

Think i might leave some for another day.....theme engine is defo going to need a rewrite and a way of searching for themes or categories rather than a plain unsorted list.

Since a bunch of themes were broken from when I moved it from CobsNET to standalone, I've had to recreate a bunch of them again.

I did more research on archive.org and found a boat load more which I've started working on, you can see progress on them on the Windows Live Spaces updates page, username is "spaces".

I've sent a request to archive.org to see if they can provide me with a list of all the themes that they had on the server with the URL I found most of them to be stored under, and better yet, if they could give me a ZIP file of the lot.

I'm not hopeful that I'll get my request fulfilled, or even a response at all for that matter, BUT, if they do and do provide anything at all, it'll be a huge help.

Even with a list of directory names I could create a script to slowly download all the bits we need over time and then recreate them all (which will take multiple hours) but would be 100% worth it.

Also looking at making a new page for the theme engine "choose a theme" page so it can properly fit more in. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while.

OK so we're pretty close to the theme engine now, a lot more work needs going in to finish it and it was tiring me out a bit.

Have instead fixed the EditProfile page which previously didn't work. It means you can now edit the profile information.

Everything you now see is dynamically loaded.

EVERYTHING

a couuple brain waves this evening and i cracked it in my brain after a few hours of thinking. Everything you see on this page is now dynamically loaded, not just gadgets being loaded, gadgets being loaded from config files that the user will be able to customise, it's going to need some gadget refactoring but I think I can do it, gadgets just need to know if they're being loaded custom so that they can read config files from the users folders and not their defaults.

This means I can now start work on the page customiser so things can be moved around as you wish. I should probably make it not possible to add system controls though, that was my first test and yeah, you can add the manage space page to someones home page which isn't ideal as if there's no user logged in, it'll cause many errors. still though, awesome it works.

Update @ 01:39am (sunday) If you already had an account, go to Manage My Space, then select Customise Space. The wizard will take you through updating your account to support the new features. There was a few bugs with it resolved.
Turns out even if a control is broken but there's still a reference, it'll try to load it for you anyways. This means if control numbers are incorrect, they'll still load but in a random order. Alternatively, if everythig is broken, the default gadgets will be loaded. You can use the RESET function in Customise Space to fix this (should it happen). It'll reset you to default but with dynamically loaded content.

Today I spent many many hours cleaning up code....like many. Unfortunately when you save pages from archive.org or export HTML elements from chrome, they're not formatted properly....this results in a huge ginormous block of text.

I did try a few VS Code plugins to sort this for me but they didn't really.....work...so back to doing it manually.

The page responsible for handling peoples profiles is now a LOT cleaner which means I can start work on adding customisation for profiles.

Just finished rewriting the Gadget HomeLeftMusicList as it was a big block of text, this now works and I've got it mostly where I want, just need to get it configurable via PHP and then create a configuration page for it so it can be dynamically generated and not what I've statically set. Pretty happy with it so far.

I think you should checkout testaccount's page. I've been playing with the themes and found out GIFs work really well as the backgrounds. Sure they have big file sizes buuuuuuuttt I think the results are worth it.

I did a whoopsie and forget to make it so that when you choose to edit a post, it would show the blog title....because I forgot that, any time you went to edit a blog post, it's title would get reset. I've fixed it now....that could've been a bit of a disaster.

Aha, so you spotted it!
I added the functionality to edit existing blog posts....

So I seen this on a few peoples pages on archive.org, they had like microcontrols at the top of their page.

So I added them here too!

Accidentally rolled the database back a few days whilst copying things (the wrong way) by accident. Luckily it was only a few dev blogs....oops!

I'll be honest i've forgot what day it is now.

Either way I've made progress. The Left/West side Photos Album gadget on a users Homepage now functions properly.

Needs fixing so that the album names cannot be endless.

Photo albums properly working now too, you can create albums and properly view images in them without it breaking.

Need to build the upload function and home page designer still.

Currently working on cleaning up the root directory as it is an absolute mess.

Gonna try copying the installation to another server once I've done that, one that's not on CobsNET. That means it'll be access by \ as the root and not home.services.spaces.live.com (only works on cobsnet) so that it should theoretically work publically then or hosted locally on a machine...

big feeling this is going to break a lot... we shall see.

You can now create photo albums and view other peoples photos!

Doesn't it just work great!

It's something like day 7, maybe day 8. Had many IBS attacks yesterday and wasn't able to complete any work on spaces at all. Just one of those things I live with and champion on. Today was better. Added debug page to the My Space for some technical stuff. Mainly to check how gadgets are loading and verify authentication. Going to need to create an interceptor to prevent unauthorised people accessing this site. Don't want any DMCA trouble and definitely don't want this being exploited. Some people just don't enjoy fun and wanna atch the world burn. Made the photos page today, it was interesting as it doesn't use the three-column standard design so had to fiddle with it for an hour to get it working. Need to rejig the photos system as this currently won't support the albums that the photos page will use. Things that need doing still: Friends system Search Better Theme Engine Custom profile layouts and controls Fix photos tab on right of profile Code cleanup Organising the files (108 in root directory at present) Fix the blog bug that causes the create new post not to show on your own page Create photo upload system Create Friends page when viewing your own or someone elses profile Fix duplicated icons on some pages Create Guestbook Create Comments page Create dedicated View Blog Post page to show comments Not sure what trackbacks are...guess some looking into to do. Secret themes and a code entry page maybe? Debated the idea of badges...not sure if that would be controversial though.

Maybe replace the button that takes you to the community with a messenger button, have a small messenger like window popout on the side, maybe this is an additional button? Need to fix a new problem where when a user is on their own page, the option for them to create a post or event at the top is missing. Central gadget ideas: Video embed / youtube Photo showcase Gallery showcase/album Left/right MOTD gadget custom text gadget (perhaps with themes like terminal? maybe this is an addition to theme engine?) hmmmm......gn

It's wednesday, half way through the week. I've been spending some evenings working on this still. Mostly code cleanup and trying to arrange things as the main folder for the server is a MESS. Lots of resources referencing the root and whatnot need changing. Theme engine still needs sorting. Created legal disclaimer under /about.html and shows when pushing the (?) Help icon. Started work on the search bar at the very top. Found a bug where if you search for a term and then push search again, it'll 404 as it passes \&q= instead of \?q= which is technically referencing the document "&q=XXX" and not \(index document)?q=. That q= bit is the query that needs to be processed back end. Recreated search.php so the search page will now load. There was just one element I could reference which was the box prompting for a search query. Everything else I'm going to have to design and write. Could've made it a gadget but considering it'll only ever get used once on that page there's kinda no point. Right now in the index file, VS Code thinks there's 327 problems... I got some figuring out to do. Debating making it so that when you push login it pops open a new window to complete the login but then that will need javascript to be waiting which won't work well. IE8 doesn't work with this project at all which is interesting, seems it doesn't like local references, i.e. if you're on the page index.html and reference the object "image.png", it'll expect it to be at http://image.png and not http(s)://{url}/{currentdoclocation}/image.png. I was going to look at rewriting this to work as an individual server that doesn't require home.services.spaces.live.com and a bunch of other domains on CobsNET but I think I'm going to hold off until I'm further into the project as I'm not sure how much is going to break if I try to change it now. Was also thinking about theme engine....it'll need URL's for custom themes UNLESS I make it so that users upload the needed files to a specific album in the Photos section and then create a picker to select which is which. the rest of the CSS for colours and fades might be interesting though.

So I dug up some more themes and started reverse engineering them to make them work again. LeBron_Graffiti looks pretty cool imo. THere's a few more being worked on: megan_lightgray, megan_plainblue, personalSpaceDkBlue, PersonalSpaceRed, RLMMoon, UniteAir_Bamboo (also looks kinda cool) and uniteair_business. Rest of the time was mostly minor bug fixes and some work to fix thigns with theme engine. It's mostly static ATM so I need to rewrite it to use the themes folder and scan that to find the requested theme rather than relying on static theme names in the file. I also made the community page again, some images are still missing because of dodgyt javascript which i'm still working on. The gadgets also need recreating for it still. Plenty more to do I guess.

So this is for Sunday, it's now the 15th at almost half past midnight.

Today's work completed:

-Created the Theme Engine page. You can now select a theme for your page based on what's available. Will make a separate section for user created themes in future.
-Created the "Manage your Space" page which allows you to create blog posts like this, and select your profile theme.

-The blog editor! It's small and incredibly basic but an achievement none-the-less. I'm writing from it now..

Really enjoying seeing this project slowly coming to life. Oh yeah, also added an option to preview themes... and the button that takes you to the page to manage your space on the Spaces dropdown. Oh and also the silver theme, known as megan_silver. Check it out on the theme engine page!

Obligatory screenshot of the new Manage your Space and Theme Engine page.

The editor isn't much, but if you can see this, it means it's working! Let's go!

It's 3am the next day (14th) now. Quite tired but figured I'd make this anyways.

Long story short I built the theme engine and made it a separate file. I updated it a lot so that users can have individual themes for their profiles, like on the original WLS.

I spent a long time decompiling the various pages I had saved and figured a LOT out:
Windows Live Spaces has EVERYTHING as Gadgets, I mean, EVERYTHING.

The Windows Live Navbar? Gadget. The Spaces Home navbar? Gadget. The title at the top of this blog? You guessed it, Gadget.

So that's when it slapped me in the face. Windows Live Spaces uses a quadrant so to speak, North, East, South and West to determine the placement of these Gadgets. The gadgets are written specifically for the area they sit in, so for example, you cannot make the Top Custom Text bar load if you put it in the West section.

Oh yeah I also wrote a gadget loader. It means I can dynamically update Gadgets without copying the entirity of the web server files each time.

There's only 9 gadgets I've rewritten so far, there's plenty more to do now.

I spent most of this evening getting the Left Profile Gadget to show the user information, I think it looks good and close to the original.

I then spent many, many hours getting the blogging function to work. Afterall, I had to write it from scratch. Everything here is done from scratch bar the templates of the pages that I found archived.

I consider this evening a great success and one step closer to bringing this project back from the dead. It's like when I finished reverse engineering OneCare to make the new installer. Great satisfaction and lots of motivation.

Oh yeah I also made my own theme, took a bit of jiggling and it's not great but enjoy the Kingsanda 80s spaceship wallpaper. The rest of the theme just uses the default Luminous theme.

I think over the next few days I want to finish all the main gadgets, get Files working, Friends Tab, Community Page, Photos tab etc. The rest of the core stuff.

Here's a picture of current progress. Cobs signing out for the evening.

So it's day 2. I've collected a boat load of data on various parts of the site. The main homepage is reconstructed.

I also got the sign-in system fully completed so that now works too which is good. I also made a default account which will get copied as new users sign-up.

I then took a break from the back-end coding and browsed as many screenshots, videos, etc as I could to find all the themes that this had, it looks like users could make their own too. I managed to pull a lot of files from these and started recreating them. I also started a theme engine which would handle these as the old ASPX source code is likely long gone and was never accessible from the users perspective anyways.

Here's a picture of a few. I think I like the luminous one the best but I'll try making my own, I think 80s style, something like one of the photos you'd see on Kingsanda's tumblr page. They look cool.

Today I found out I was on-call with work and that realistically means I can't do much over the weekend.

However, I've recently been eyeing up an old retired platform that Microsoft created many years ago called Windows Live Spaces. It's intriuging to me, it was basically a platform like FaceBook or Twitter with a mix of MySpace thrown in and a bunch of 'Gadgets' that you could add to your page to customise it.

I spent most of the day downloading archived pages and assets to try and get this started, afterall, if I cannot reproduce any of the pages I'll need without relying on external servers, I'm gonna be a bit stuck.

Windows Live Spaces was written in ASPX as far as I can tell, which likely means a C# backend.

I've never been fond of ASPX so I'm going to try PHP instead.

Here's a screenshot of some of the things I downloaded. It's messy and badly named, I know.