Published on 04/30/09.
We recently added a new field to the admin area in your Net-at-hand website which is called “title search”. Basically, this gives you an easy way to find content in your site.
As the size of your website grows, it might get harder to navigate to the content you want to edit. The title search will let you look for items based on their title name. Anything that is not in the garbage will show up in the search results.
It may not be very fancy, but I hope it helps you get the job done more easily.
Published on 04/03/09.
We are coming up on two years that Net-at-hand has been in production and we are very pleased with how everything has progressed so far. Net-at-hand has proven to be a stable and robust platform for building websites, and it is only going to get better.
One thing about running a successful web application like Net-at-hand is that we must always be prepared to grow. As more people start to use the service, more strain is placed on the resources that run that service.
So the time has come to take the next step which is to upgrade the server that Net-at-hand runs on. To this end, we will be taking Net-at-hand down tonight (4/3) at 12:00 am EDT. We are expecting the time that the server will be down to be about 10 minutes, but it could take upward to 60 minutes.
Basically what we are going to be doing is setting Net-at-hand up on a new server instance that will double the size of the server. This will let us handle the increased traffic (and file uploads) better.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about anything.
UPDATE—The server upgrade went very smoothly, though it ended up taking over an hour and a half before we got everything back up and running. But the system is seems to be performing well. Let us know if you notice any issues.
Published on 03/06/09.
Last month, when we upgraded some of the system components used for Net-at-hand, the upgrade changed the way that dates and times are handled within the programming code of Net-at-hand. This change caused some events to not show up in the calendar as they should have.
Upon discovering the problem, we decided to make some basic changes to how Net-at-hand handles dates in the background. These changes aren’t going to bring anything noticeably different right now (other than your calendars displaying properly :), but it is going to open the door for some additional features for the calendar.
Published on 03/02/09.
This evening at around 6:30 pm we became aware of an issue some people were having when trying to attach new images to a page.
Because of some changes that we have been making to Net-at-hand recently, images that were attached to pages were not properly saved and were over-writing each other.
We were able to find the bug pretty quickly and have fixed it. It should not cause you any more problems.
Published on 03/01/09.
Beginning Sunday, 3/1/09, the url (web address) for items in Net-at-hand websites have changed.
Previously, the url for a page was made up of the title of the page with all the including folders as well. For example, if you had a page called “My history” in a folder called “About me”, then the url for that page would have been ”/about-me/my-history”.
The new url format is a bit simpler (and faster for the system to generate). Now, the url for that same page in the previous paragraph would be ”/my-history:[id#]” where [id#] would be a the specific id number for that page in the system.
Now, we will be the first to admit that this new format is not as clean-looking as the old. We actually like the old format better in that regard. However, the new one is much simpler for the system to generate and will help keep system performance better overall.
Don’t worry if you have hard-coded any of the old style urls into your website. Your content is still available at the old address. But any url’s that are automatically generated by the system will using the new style.
Side note Those of you who are wise in the way of SEO best practices might be wondering why we are letting content be available at two different urls. It will be a fairly simple matter to set up Net-at-hand to redirect all old-style urls to the new format, but we are waiting to make sure the are no unforeseen consequences to doing so. One example is if you need to include a webpage at a specific url for some system (such as Google’s webmaster tools). The new style urls will not work in that scenario. We will figure out the best way to handle this and address it when the time comes.
Published on 02/03/09.
We took Net-at-hand down for about 45 minutes this morning in order to perform some maintenance and system upgrades. Your websites were available to your visitors during all but about three minutes of that time.
During this maintenance we performed upgrades to some of Net-at-hand’s underlying system components. These upgrades should improve the system overall (which hasn’t had any problems), but more importantly, the upgrades will pave the way for some exciting changes that are coming to Net-at-hand in the days and weeks ahead.
Anytime changes are introduced to a stable system, there is the potential for problems. Rest assured that we are constantly monitoring Net-at-hand for any problems and will take immediate action if any issue arrises.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any concerns.
Published on 10/08/08.
The server that Net-at-hand runs on became unresponsive this morning around 4:01 am CDT. Once the server started up, there were a couple things that we needed to take care of to get the system back up and running. As of 6:18 am CDT everything is running and functioning normally.
We are not sure at this time what may have caused this issue, but we will be monitoring the server throughout the day today to see if further action is needed.
We apologize for the downtime.
Published on 07/29/08.
Part of our philosophy at Net-at-hand is that we do not try to do everything ourselves. We rely on third parties for different aspects of the service that we provide for the simple reason that we want to focus on doing what we do best, which is providing an easy to use web interface for the purpose of publishing websites.
One of the main areas that we rely on third parties in is our servers. We don’t own the servers that we use, we rely on the services of third parties to provide provide the server infrastructure and maintain them.
Slice host is the provider that we use for the main application servers. They have been very good for us because they allow us complete access to the server; we can set up the exact environment we need to make Net-at-hand efficient. Their service is also excellent, if something goes wrong their staff knows about it before we do usually and has emailed us directly to say what has happened and what they are doing to fix it.
Slicehost, however, had nothing to do with the issue on July 20.
The second major service that we use is the Simple Storage Service from Amazon Web Services. This is a service provided by amazon.com that opens up part of their very robust infrastructure for use by other web developers. Net-at-hand uses this service for the storage and serving of all image, mp3, and file uploads.
Amazon Simple Storage Service has had two issues this year that have resulted in downtime. One was back in February, and the second was on July 20. Throughout both of those times, the staff was very good at keeping me informed about the situation. You can read a full description of the event here. This is a direct description of what happened, what they did throughout the situation, and what they have done to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Why we use Amazon Simple Storage Service
We use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) because it allows us to have the infrastructure in place to grow indefinitely. If we have thousands of customers uploading one hundred images per day, or millions of customers uploading hundreds per day, we have the storage and serving infrastructure in place to handle it. Amazon S3 is built on the same infrastructure as amazon.com, so we know it is going to be able to hold up to the load.
However, and this is a big however, we are not tied to Amazon S3 by any means. If the service proved to be unreliable, we could easily switch to a different platform. The list of distributed online storage services like Amazon S3 is growing quickly.
We feel however, for now anyway, that Amazon S3 offers the best solution for the needs of Net-at-hand and our customers.