EDIT (12/31 @ 7:57 PM): Mail problems appear to be fixed now. It seems that both inbound and outbound mail may not have been delivered in the last day. If you had sent mail to any external non-zoji email addresses last night or today, you may want to send it again. Likewise if you were expecting any email, you might want to ask the sender to send it again.
Never seen that problem again (and naturally, it decides to happen when Dan's gone), and hopefully never will again. Again sorry for the inconvenience!
EDIT (12/31 @ 8:52PM): Nevermind! Looks like all that queued up inbound and outbound mail is getting delievered after all, just a little late! Phew!
To that end, we've extended the Tips feature to cover Zoji suggestions. Check out the Zoji Suggestions section of the Tipz tab. There you'll find a bunch of suggestions that people have made to the Zoji Talk group. You can now use Tips as a way of essentially voting for the features you'd like to see most. Like an idea? Give it two thumbs up. Think it's a waste of time? Vote it down.
Got an idea that's not on the list? Post to Zoji Talk to let us know, and we'll add it.
Tips, tips, tips!
We were really happy to see that a lot of you have embraced our new tips feature and have taken the opportunity to let us in on your favorite (and least favorite) restaurants and bars. Well, tonight, we're expanding on that feature in a big way with the addition of a new Tipz tab, and a bunch of new things you can post tips on: movies, TV shows, and books. You'll find a new "post" link in your My Zoji menu that you can use to create new tips for these types.
Among the other new Tips features:
- Check out the nifty new maps we have on restaurant and bar pages!
- Friendly urls for tips (e.g. http://www.zoji.com/tips/123)
- The restaurant and bars & clubs search pages are now browser Back button friendly--if you click on a restaurant, then click the back button, you'll be taken back to the same page in your search results that you were in before.
Notification settings
Several of you complained that you didn't care to see Tip notifications in your "What's New" box. Well, that shouldn't be a problem anymore with the addition of notifications options. Just click on the gear icon in your What's New box, and you can select what kinds of notifications you want to see in your All tab. You'll still receive all the different types of notifications, but the ones you deselected will now appear only in their respective tabs.
On a related note, when posting a tip, you now have the option not to notify your friends.
Public events improvements
We've rolled out some improvements to the public events tab. There should now be a better selection of events in our list, as well new links to a map of the location and to find out more about the events. Try it out, the scheme Dan came up with for the more info link is pretty clever IMO. :-)
What else?
Dan's had a hard enough time just keeping Zoji running between bizarre database corruption issues and power outages...but somehow he's found the time to also work on an array of performance issues (including building a shiny new database server, and optimizing some of our slower DB queries). It's a dirty job but somebody's gotta do it. Hopefully the end result will be a happier, faster Zoji.
Finally, we've fixed a bunch of minor bugs that I don't have the energy to go into. :-)
Anyway, that's what's new. Hope you like the new features and find the site a little zippier!
What's in store for tomorrow? Stay tuned...
Apologies for the unexpected outage today. We realize the extremely bad timing of it, considering most people are having "a bad case of the Mondays"... but here's what's been happening, for the technically curious.
For the past couple months we've been building up a new, faster, supposedly more reliable database to replace the old one. The only issue was finding a good time to do the replacement, when not a lot of people were online. So at 4AM Sunday morning we decided to go ahead with the surgery, and at 9AM it was complete and verified, things seemed to be working fine. No one probably noticed anything, except the site should've seemed slightly faster. And that's the way it should've been.
Today we woke up to find the database in a shutdown state (thanks Alan and Ian for the heads-up), of course causing Zoji to be completely unavailable. Looking through the database error log, it appears the hiccuping started last night, first with a mysterious spontaneous restart, a somewhat half-assed recovery, then another restart this morning at 9:42AM, this time it could not start up. An analysis of the zoji data files found most tables completely corrupted, and attempts to repair them were futile. A reboot of the machine gave a CRC error, subsequent reboot was OK but attempts to repair the database tables crashed the server with a kernel stack dump. Situation looking pretty desperate. Thankfully the backup database was intact, so we still had a good uncorrupted replicated copy of the latest data. Question is, what to do...
After a quick phone call to the Zoji board of directors, an executive decision was made to copy the backup data to the old database server, essentially reverting back to our setup before Sunday. At approximately 3:30PM the site was turned back on, and has since appeared to be ok.
We are still at a loss why the new database puked the way it did. We are only hoping it was indeed hardware-related and that going back to the old tried-and-true database somehow makes Zoji happier.
Change is difficult, even for computers ... ok I'm gonna get a piece of chocolate cake now.
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