Miscellaneous

Just a quick update on a problem some may recently experienced when using search. During the last days we had some problems with the stability of our full-text search service. We are currently tweaking the monitoring and automatic recovery mechanisms to hopefully increase the availability and reliability of this feature.

Just saw that there has been a problem with Spaaze on Sunday evening CST, respectively Monday morning UTC. Just wanted to let you know that this had nothing to do with our new servers, but rather was one of the rare problems of our hosting provider Rackspace. Seems like they had a network issue between 4:35 and 6:00 pm CST. Once their issues had been resolved Spaaze continued to work normally.

As described in the last blog post, we haven't been able to perform the actual server upgrade last Saturday. Now we've chosen to go a safer way. We prepare everything, and will simply point spaaze.com to the new server when ready. Since Spaaze isn't using a Load Balancer yet (I can only hope that there will be so many people in the future that we'll have to scale our infrastructure) I prefer to turn off the old one while the transition is in progress (to not mix up states between the two servers). This will be much less painful than what I had planned last Saturday, and need less time.

Spaaze will experience a maintenance downtime on Sat. 3/3/12 starting at 2 pm UTC. We'll plan to completely reinstall our application server (switching to a newer operating system) and therefore will be down for approximately 1h. I'll update this article when I have more information and post the actual maintenance start and end on Twitter when they happen. Unfortunately I fear that when using Spaaze while the server goes down no appropriate message will pop up, therefore I'll try to put up an info message within the app during the next week.

As mentioned in the last post about the new homepage (over two months ago), I had planned to apply the new design on the blog as well. As you are reading this you probably have already noticed that this has finally happened now! It probably still needs some tweaking, but overall I'm quite happy with the result. The homepage and the blog (although two different systems) now integrate much better in each other (although not perfectly).

Irian, the company behind Spaaze has launched a new service. It's a neat simple and fast chat service.

SimpleMeet.me allows you to easily get in touch with one or more people - no signup or setup required. Just go to http://simplemeet.me, pass your code to your contact and immediately start a chat. Communication made unprecedentedly easy.

Just a short service announcement. I just finished release 1.30 of Spaaze which I will deploy tomorrow. Since this release includes a DB update there will a longer than usual downtime. Usually new releases only cause a service interruption of a second or so which doesn't cause any problems for Spaaze. this time though I'll need about an hour I guess, and clients will not be able to save any unsaved changes when the service is back online!

To cut a long story short: Tomorrow, Jul 20th, starting from 12pm (12:00) UTC there will be a planned downtime.

It has been some time since the last release I've posted about, and I wanted to provide you with an update about what's planned for Spaaze in the next months.

Back in February I posted statistics about the item usage statistics of the first full moth of Spaaze in January (here). I just thought that I could do that again and provide an update on item usage:

Some code changes with the release of the collaboration features two days ago caused an error with OpenID logins (also Google and Yahoo logins). The error caused OpenID logins to create a new board, instead of opening the existing board, without a way to reach your old boards. This has been fixed now, but all users who were affected by this still won't be able to reach their old boards. The old data IS NOT LOST though! So if you are experiencing the described phenomenon, please contact me, so that I can restore access to your board. I'm really sorry for any inconvenience this might has caused.