maintenance

We’ll be doing a little bit of maintenance tonight where we need to bring the database down to make a few changes. We plan to take it down around 6:30pm, make the changes, do some final testing, and have everything up and running before 7:30pm. Sorry for picking such a weird time for maintenance, but since we have day jobs this is what we have to work with.

So, this is your excuse to go to happy hour early and shout to let your friends know. Hopefully, by 6:30 you’ll be having so much fun that you won’t notice that we are down for maintenance.

We’ll post an update to Twitter to let you know that we’re back up and running.

In our last post, we talked about the big update today. The good news is that almost everything seems to be working. The bad news is that we’re having some issues with SMS. Currently SMS commands and notifications are offline. We’ll post another update here when we get SMS back in working order.

In the meantime, you can enjoy Shizzow from the web interface (please be gentle). We’ll need to push some bug fixes later, so we may have intermittent short maintenance windows until we get the SMS issue resolved.

Update: 6:50pm: As we suspected, the SMS issue was with our SMS provider and not on the Shizzow side, but it was a crazy coincidence that it happened on the same day. A few minutes ago, the issue automagically corrected itself. The only side effect is that everything queued up at the provider just slammed through the system. You may have just received a wave of notifications, and you might have noticed a few breakfast / lunch shouts coming through now. We’re hoping that things have stabilized, but please let us know if you have any additional issues.

Most of you already know that we have been working hard on getting the API ready for people to use. Unfortunately, this also resulted in rewriting and refactoring big chunks of the existing Shizzow code to get it ready for the API.

Tomorrow, Sunday, January 10th we will be taking the site down at 1pm to deploy a bunch of changes. Plan for Shizzow to be down from 1pm - 2pm; however, if all goes well, the downtime will be much shorter. Because so much of the code changed, we’d be surprised if we didn’t introduce a few new bugs for you to find. Think of it as a Shizzow hide and seek project this week. Those bugs are hiding out there somewhere, and your mission is to find them!

Here’s what we need from you:

• As you use Shizzow on Sunday and Monday, please find a few of those hidden bugs and log the issues for us in Get Satisfaction.
• We will be opening the API up to a few beta testers soon. Please contact me (dawn at Shizzow.com) or leave a comment on this post if you want to participate in the private beta for the API by building an app using the Shizzow API. We have a Shizzow Dev Google Group that we’re using for developer collaboration, and we would love to have a couple more people looking at the API beta.

We wanted to let everyone know that we are preparing for some maintenance on Saturday at 2:00pm. If all goes well, there should only be 15 - 30 minutes of downtime.

We have been running Shizzow in a shared environment along with a couple of other web sites, and now that our baby is growing up, it requires a little more room to grow. We’re moving Shizzow onto a dedicated environment where our testing so far is showing some improved performance and faster response times. It will also help to avoid issues like the one last Friday where Shizzow was down for about 15 minutes due to an issue with one of the other websites on the server consuming more than its fair share of system resources.

Most of the preparation for the move has already been completed. We’ll need to put the site on the old server into maintenance mode, pull a final copy of the db, and then wait about 10 minutes for DNS propagation. If you see the down for maintenance screen, just wait about 15 minutes and try again. Please let us know as soon as possible if you see any strange behavior over the weekend, and log any issues on Get Satisfaction.

We will use the Twitter account for any last minute updates, reminders, or issues encountered during the move.