Can you believe it's been two years since osk status was properly redone to be a full-fledged status page? In case you can, and you've been annoyed at the lack of an API, you will be pleased to hear I have made a proper API for osk status, available today.

In general, the purpose of the API is to make it easy for you (a potential developer) to get any information you might need, without having to implement any of the status logic yourself. Normally, the client (the JS on the page) assembles the page's information (state of all services, which incidents to show, etc...) on its own, while the server only supplies all the data sources necessary. While this is still the case, the new developer API does the same logic and more for you, so you have less to worry about.

That said, the API has been written with flexibility in mind, so you may choose what data to retrieve and how, by specifying exactly what fields to export, getting data from just a single service, and more. I've put a bit of work into making the documentation nice to read, with foldable explanations of every field and class. Even if you're not interested in writing against the API, I hope you'll still enjoy the small design touches.

You can find the documentation for the new osk status API at status.osk.sh/api/.

Sounds boring, what about that header picture?

Try going to osk status yourself! You'll find I added a completely useless but very cool-looking world map to the front page. It shows where everyone playing TETR.IO is right now, as well as what "spool server" (regional WebSocket proxy) they're connected to. If you hover over it, it'll show you where all the spool servers are and how they're doing!

Finally, I also added information showing the amount of players connected to each spool server. (This is actually useful for me, it used to be quite hard to see how users are spread out between them.)

osk status is generally a page people don't want to have to go to. That is, people only tend to check status pages if they're having issues with a service. So, I've always found it pretty important to give these people a strong feeling that whoever is running this shebang can be trusted to run a service.

With osk status, I hope to earn that trust through both honest and clear reporting (none of those glorified blogs that always claim "All Systems Operational"), as well as through a bit of design flair. I could talk about this for a long time, but osk status's over-the-top design is entirely geared toward giving people who end up on it (usually not for fun reasons) the feeling that they can trust the service and the game they enjoy is in good hands.

A first impression made through UI that tries to evoke a feeling, tell a story, or express a specific intent is one that sticks with people, and I can only hope that by adding a really dumb map to osk status, I can make a bit of that happen :^)