Keyvan Nayyeri

A few hours ago finally I made Waegis public and launched the Beta version to move to a new stage of the existence of the Waegis project. You can read the first blog post that announced this launch here.

Waegis is public on its own domain with the very beautiful and light theme that Shaho has designed for it. You can go ahead and register on the site and activate your account and then grab an API key and download the appropriate plug-in for your application to start using the service.

At the moment, I have provided an open source .NET library for working with Waegis API that is named Waegis .NET, licensed under a New BSD License and hosted on CodePlex. You can download this library from Waegis site.

Waegis RESTful API is documented on Waegis site so you can adapt it for any other platform and of course I’ll appreciate doing this.

On the other hand, there are several plug-ins for Community Server 2008, Community Server 2007.1, Community Server 2.1, Graffiti CMS 1.1, Graffiti CMS 1.0, BlogEngine.NET 1.4 and BlogEngine.NET 1.3 that work based on this .NET library and you can download and use them easily. All you need to use Waegis service is grabbing an API key from Waegis site after registration.

There are some limitations for the Beta stage that I’ll publish later today but in general small and medium sites can start using the service without worrying about anything. Of course, there may be some minor problems with the site and service that I’ll fix quickly so if you faced with such problems, just report them.

At the first few minutes of public launch there was an issue in user activation system that was very weird and was stopping users from activation. First a few users experienced and reported this and I applied a fix quickly. I would thank Phil Haack who was the first public user of the site and the first one who gave me some initial feedback. Twitter showed a new face in this situation. After my Tweet about the launch some people went smoothly to the site and found the issue and this let me work on the problem without much pressure.

Even though there was a short two weeks delay in my initial plan for the final launch of the site but this delay was mostly related to the hosting set up and beneficially let me improve the software and aggregate more initial data. This would also let me shorten the Beta stage from 4-6 weeks to 3-5 weeks. As you saw, the setup process also stopped me from doing the launch yesterday!

There isn’t any other point to mention about the site and service. I hope that Waegis can satisfy its clients and I’m always listening to your feedback in order to improve things. After moving to the final version we will also offer commercial API keys that can help us keep a better quality for all the clients. There are also some programs for free commercial API keys for educational and non-profile use. As a part of these programs, I want to offer free commercial API keys to .NET communities.

If you’re interested to help and promote the site, I can suggest you two general ways that are blogging about Waegis and bookmarking it on social bookmarking sites using the following links:

Let’s see how Waegis can help the web!