net-at-hand™

Image server down

Today at 11:05am CDT the servers that hold all image, audio, and file uploads have stopped responding. A team of engineers is addressing the problem, but we do not, at this time, know how long it will take to get the servers back up. We will update this post when further information is available.

UPDATE 4:36pm CDT—The first hurdle to getting all the servers back up has been passed. Essentially, all the servers can now communicate with each other. The engineers are now working on restoring each server’s ability to accept requests.

UPDATE 7:00pm CDT—The image servers have all been fully restored and are functioning normally. We will post more information about this failure once a full investigation has been completed. We appreciate your patience.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

New design group

We actually posted this design a couple of weeks ago, but failed to say anything about it here.

The “Minimalist” design group is now available for everyone to use. Like all the other groups, there are five color schemes to choose from. The goal of this design was to create something simple and clean that would work in many different applications.

Performance issues with stats view

We have discovered that the stats view is causing some pretty serious performance issues on the system so we have temporarily disabled the view until we can sort it all out.

While you will not be able to see the stats, the system will still be collecting the information, so when the view is again available, you will not have lost information.

We are embarrassed that this has happened, but it will give us a chance to do a little bit of homework and make Net-at-hand even better. We appreciate your patience. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

UPDATE – 7/15

The performance issue with the stats tab has been fixed and everything is back up the way it should be. The problem existed because of an error we made in writing the code.

Thanks for your patience while we were working on it.

Visitor stats

One of the features that has been requested the most was a way to view visitor stats for a website. We are glad to announce that we have added a “stats” area to the “site” tab. The stats area will show a graph of the number of visitors, page views, and unique page views for your site. You can view a full year at a time, or drill down to individual months.

Server Maintenance

The Net-at-hand system will be taken down for about an hour at 10:00pm CDT (GMT-5:00) on Saturday, June 14. This will be for the purpose of some routine maintenance as well as something new that we will be announcing soon.

During the time that Net-at-hand is off-line, your website will be viewable just as it always is; however, you will not be able to log in and make any changes.

Please feel free to contact support if you have any questions.

Secure connection now available

We have completed setting up net-at-hand to run over a secure connection in addition to a non-secure connection.

If you set your login page to
https://net-at-hand.com/account/login
then you entire session with net-at-hand will be encrypted and secure.

This will ensure that your login information will not be viewed by anyone if you work on your net-at-hand site while at a coffee shop or some other public network.

Note: Your browser may show an error when you view the encrypted page stating that it cannot verify the identity of the website you are visiting. This occurs because we are using a certificate that we signed ourselves. The information that you send over the network is securely encrypted.

Image uploads

I recently discovered that images that were uploaded to Net-at-hand were not being compressed like they should have been for viewing on your website. This would make uploaded images view very slowly.

I am glad to say that the issue has been fixed, and images should load a bit faster now when they are viewed in your website.

Note that this does not affect images that you already have on your site. You can fix those by uploading them again.

Easier editing of calendar events

Some of you were making good use of the calendar feature and had many events listed. This would make things a little unwieldy when you went to edit the calendar, having to scroll through a list of all the events that were in your calendar.

We have changed things so when you click to edit a calendar, it only shows you the events for the current month. In order to view events for other months, we have a navigation area which will allow you to select which month you want to add events for.

We have also made some slight changes to the rendering of the calendar:

• We added a heading above the calendar to show the day of the week.
• We got rid of the extra week above and below the calendar view to make it look more like a normal calendar.