It’s a sad day today. I’ve had to turn off the ability to make stickers & minicards at Mooplr.com.
Unfortunately the folks at Moo.com have disabled their API, which means any other sites which use it (including this one) will no longer work.
I’ve been assured that Moo are working on a new and improved API, which they hope to release in the near future. When they do, hopefully Mooplr.com will be back up and running. In the meantime, any updates will be here at the Mooplr blog.
You may have noticed that Mooplr.com appears to have been broken for some time. I must apologise, this has unfortunately only come to my attention today. It appears that since Moo.com rolled out their new US based site, they changed the URL endpoint of their API from www.moo.com to uk.moo.com and neglected to tell anyone. Yay!
The knock-on effect of this is that all Moo.com API orders will be routed through their European store. I’m sorry guys, but if you wanted to use the new US-based Moo.com then I’m afraid you’re out of luck until they decide to support it in the API. As soon as I hear anything from the folks at Moo about progress on this, I’ll let you know.
Everything should be back in order with Mooplr.com now though, so please do try it out and let me know what you think.
It appears poor old Mooplr has been having trouble getting its stickers and minicards over to Moo.com of late. Fear not though, as the problems have been routed out by yours truly.
If you tried creating Mooplr stickers or minicards in the last few weeks and were getting an awful “500 Internal Server Error” message, please head back over to the main Mooplr.com site and give it another go. A while back I changed the font on the Mooplr minicards & stickers to one that was more inclusive for non-latin characters. Unfortunatley this seemed to cause some issues with Moo which was causing the error. However, Mooplr is using a new image format now which seems to be placating Moo for the time being.
We have also been experiencing a few issues with large numbers of stickers/minicards being sent to Moo. Unfortunately this is being caused by processes on the Moo side of the equation, and are thus beyond my control. I appreciate how frustrating it can be to select a large number of cities only for the process to fail, and please believe me when I say that I’m monitoring the situation very closely. For the time being the issues with large uploads to Moo have been resolved, but should they occur again then I’ll be straight over there, banging on their (virtual) door.
Please remember, if you have any comments, concerns or problems with Mooplr.com, feel free to drop me an email. My name is kev and I can be found at lloydie.co.uk.
The Dopplr Shop, featuring Mooplr stickers
As some of your have already noticed, Mooplr has been honored by the good people at Dopplr by being featured in their new shop!
The brand new Dopplr Shop over at shop.dopplr.com features loads of special offers, from magazine subscriptions to frequent travel SIM cards. And now, right beside everything the cultured frequent traveller requires, Mooplr stickers & minicards!
Please do head on over to shop.dopplr.com and see all the other exciting things on offer. And whilst you’re there, feel free to thank the Dopplr folk for featuring Mooplr!
Introducing…. Minicards!! Yes, you can now create Moo minicards using the cities from Dopplr, just like you can with stickers.
Minicards are kind of like business cards, except smaller and a lot more awesome. They’re high quality, full colour little cards featuring the city name and colour on one side and whatever text you want on the other. That’s right, you can add up to 6 lines of text in a variety of fonts and colours on the other side of the card, and even include a small picture too!
So go on, get creating some Moo/Dopplr minicards (and don’t forget to post your photos to the Moo/Dopplr flickr group too).
This evening sees a couple of slight changes on Mooplr, namely a lovely “add all” button and some much coveted preview goodness.
The “add all” button should be fairly self explanatory. You click it, it adds all the cities to the list, ready for them to recieve some sticker love (once you click on the “make stickers” button, obviously).
The previews part is slightly less self explanatory. Once you do click on that “make stickers” button, rather than be taken to the Moo screen that lets you chose your sticker packaging, you’ll now be shown a little preview of the stickers by the lovely people at Moo. If you don’t like any of the stickers and would rather not print them, just click on the “don’t use this photo” box to exclude it from your final sticker set.
As always, comments & suggestions are more than welcome here on the Mooplr.com blog.
The Mooplr Blog is only hours old and already it bears exciting news! Today sees the roll-out of a new font for Mooplr stickers!
A couple of days ago, Stefan of the Moo People gave me a nudge to tell me that he was seeing some missing letters in Mooplr sticker names – namely of those cities containing a Macron (e.g. the line above the ‘o’ in Ōsaka and Kyōto). This turned out to be a problem with the font I was originally using to generate the text on the bottom of each sticker. A little bit of digging later and I’ve managed to turn up a font that supports a much wider set of characters (including the missing ones Stef pointed out).
But that’s not all! I’ve also increased the size of the images that Mooplr sends to Moo for printing. What does this mean? Bigger stickers? Well, no. But it does mean that the regular stickers should now see an increase in the text quality! I should also point out that this increased size may slightly decrease the speed of Mooplr.com, as it takes us more time to send the images to Moo (you know, because they’re bigger). This should be short-lived though, as we’ll only need to do it once per city (the good people of Moo don’t forget the images we send them). Once you see those high quality stickers, I’m sure you’ll agree that they’re worth the wait.
Welcome to the Mooplr Blog! I figured that, as I was updating the Mooplr.com site all the time, it would be a good idea to have some place where I can tell people about all the new stuff that I’m working on. Previously I’ve been writing about Mooplr developments over on my personal blog, but I decided that Mooplr needed it’s own voice – so here it is!
Mooplr is a site that lets you create Moo stickers using the cities from Dopplr. Since it’s launch I’ve also added past and future trips, picking the cities up automatically from your Dopplr journal and allowing you to make stickers with them.
I’ve got loads of new ideas in the pipeline for Mooplr but, as always, feedback is more than welcome. Please do feel free to post comments on this blog and let me know how I’m doing and what extra stuff you like to see Mooplr do next.
If you want to know more about Mooplr, or me, why not head over to the about page.