GTD Tracks blog

Getting Hammered

Ryan — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 10:28:10 -0400

We’ve been under siege for a few days now from your normal internet hooligans in the form of spam bots and people trying to use GTDTracks as an open proxy. While we’ve closed off our server to be used as an open proxy, we’‘re still getting hit hard by people who are trying to exploit the server. During this time your response times may not be as ideal as we’d like them to be, but I’m pretty sure we can weather this out without any serious disruption.

Downtime this Morning

Ryan — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 13:31:00 -0400

In a very frustrating incident this morning, GTDTracks was down for a few hours. The cause – a billing confusion on the part of our hosting provider.

To say I am not happy is an understatement. Our apologies for the downtime.

The irony is that the incident was caused by the fact that I was trying to increase the amount of memory on the server, to provide better performance for my users, yet it has the complete opposite effect. Real funny.

Today's Unexpected Downtime

Ryan — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:17:08 -0500

We had some unexpected downtime today, from about 6:20pm to 7:10 pm EST. The site was unreachable and could not be pinged. I’m working with the hosting company to determine its cause.

In the meantime, the site is back up and functioning as it should.

Upgrade Complete, Feeds Fixed

Ryan — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:58:00 -0500

I ran an update tonight with some custom patches to get the feeds working again (as well as some bug fixes from the main Tracks branch). Do me a favor and comment here if you’re still seeing feed issues.

Bug Fix Upgrade Tonight

Ryan — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 08:00:37 -0500

We’re planning on pushing out an upgrade this evening (10:30pm EST) that will fix the broken feeds and some date inconsistencies. Should be only momentary downtime (in the seconds, if you notice it at all – won’t hurt a bit).

New Features

Ryan — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 08:24:28 -0500

GTDTracks was successfully upgraded last night to the latest Tracks source. With it has brought new features like tagging and personal timezone settings. It has also brought some small changes in the way you may be used to entering data that should be pointed out:

When you add a new action, the Context and Project fields are now auto-complete fields which means that once you start typing your context or project name, it will display a list of options matching what you’re typing. This differs from the previous version which had standard drop down select lists.
The Show from field is now available when you create your actions, allowing you to create a tickler item even from the main actions page.

It does appear that any tickler items you had created prior to last night’s upgrade will now be visible in your main actions list. To get these back to the tickler and off your inbox you can simply edit and update the tickler items (without making any changes) to get them back where they belong.

Please let us know if you have any other issues with the upgrade!

Upgrade Tomorrow

Ryan — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 10:06:29 -0500

We are tentatively planning on upgrading to the latest version of Tracks tomorrow (Thursday the 15th) at 10:30pm EST.

See the previous post for some cool new features to look forward to.

Upgrade in the Near Future

Ryan — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 11:40:00 -0500

We haven’t had an upgrade in a long time due to the lack of milsetone releases from Tracks. However, many of you have voiced the desire for features that are only available in these intermittent releases. We’ve heard you and have implemented a better way to integrate bleeding edge features from Tracks into GTDTracks.

We will be evaluating an upgrade to the latest version of Tracks this week that will, among other things, add the following:

The ability to set your own timezone (instead of relying on the tz set by the administrator)
Tagging – you can now tag your actions
Export your data – there’s now a standard export mechanism provided by Tracks which will be useful in switching Tracks providers in the future. However, unfortunately, there’s no standard import mechanism yet (hey, exporting is half the battle!)

I hope to have the upgrade in place sometime this week. Stay tuned for further details and let us know if you have any comments/complaints about the process.

Planned Downtime

Ryan — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 15:04:00 -0500

Unless you hear otherwise, I am planning on moving our account to a new host tonight at 9pm EST.

Completed at 9:10 pm EST. Please let this be the last of our extremely back luck!

Continued Connectivity Issues

Ryan — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 12:23:41 -0500

We are continuing to have connectivity issues with our new hosting providers. This manifests itself as short periods of downtime (30 minutes or so). This is a network issue and not a system(server) stability issue. Your data and the app is running very nicely – it’s just that you can’t get to it. (which is completely useless, I realize)

I am working with the hosting company to get on a host that is not experiencing these network issues and will update you appropriately. I would say that, barring an immediate resolution to this issue, I will try and get our account moved sometime tonight.

Believe when I say that this last week has been very frustrating for me, both as a user and a sysadmin. I am working very hard to permanently remedy this situation.