MyChores Journal

We are now up and running with Rails 2.0.2. There were a few unforseen difficulties along the way, and you will probably need to login again. We are now storing session information in the database rather than cache in your browser. This turns out to be more secure.

The American English spellings are ready and our friends in America should already see the changes. It’ll be a while before we can start to translate into other languages because i need to make all the files aware of the globalization plugin. For now i have just done the words phrases that we needed for American spelling.

Please visit our new statistics page to see the glorious new Google Charts. I am really pleased with these! Your personal statistics page should also look a bit prettier for you now, with a nice little sparkline chart showing the tasks you have completed recently. This is mine:

I guess i do most of my chores on Sundays, heh! :)

MyChores Mobile is lagging behind, but i don’t think anybody uses it. I am planning to completely re-write it, making it use the API instead of having its own separate code-base. I’m not sure when this will happen, but it probably needs to be soon.

If you find anything wrong please do get in touch!

I am very excited about some enhancements coming very soon! Firstly, let me tell you about something i released last month but kept quiet about it: in-place editing. You can now edit a task’s title and due date from your workload list without going to the edit page. It needs a setting activated in Preferences - Workload Preferences. Ensure JavaScript is enabled and tick on the in-place editing for the fields you wish to have quick-edit-ability. Many thanks to Jennifer for suggesting and testing this.

Now for the new stuff!

We are about ready to move to Rails 2.0.2. This doesn’t mean much to any of us except the site will hopefully run a bit faster. One consequence of moving up is the old paging functionality is no longer supported. This is the main reason i didn’t switch until now. The good thing about this is that i have implemented a new paging plugin which looks rather like Flickr, Del.icio.us, et al.

A reminder (because you will soon forget!) of how it looks currently:

How it will look in the near future:

I don’t think any of us will miss the old version; this one is so much easier to use!

Another great thing i have discovered is Google Chart. Our statistics page is soon have a beautiful revamp. It means we can do cute things like this on the welcome page:

This is the number of tasks completed in the last 28 days. You can see the dip where we had that major outage earlier this month. Obviously this one won’t update, but the charts on the site will update in real-time.

Finally … i am so hyped up about this one … localisation is coming! We are about ready to go live with American English, meaning that you can have ‘Help center’, ‘color’, ‘localization’ etc showing up with the American spelling. It’ll be a configurable option, but anyone whose time zone is in America will get set to American English by default.

The really exciting thing about this is … before too long we’ll be able to translate the entire site into multiple languages. When i say ‘we’ i actually mean ‘you’! If you want to translate MyChores into your own language, you will have the option to do it. I will explain more when the time comes! :)

Sorry to the people who were still using the old RSS feed address. I think i lost the URL rewrite rule when i upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. This would be why MyChores journal has not been syndicating on LiveJournal for a few weeks. I’m very sorry about that, especially during this troubled week when you could have done with knowing what was going on. It should be working again now.

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I am happy to report that MyChores is finally back on track and working as it should. The emails are going out and the OpenID functionality has been restored. Actually, there was a bit of code tweaking to be done to be compatible with a newer version of the ruby-openid gem so i’m glad that’s done now.

Thank you ever so much for your patience this week.

The email issue has been sorted and emails are coming through now. We have an idea of a fix for the OpenID issue, which i will try this evening.

Many thanks for your patience.

I am very sorry about this. HostingRails are working on it, but they are not providing the helpful service that i had come to trust. I guess they are fixing a lot of problems for a lot of people after the restore. We will have to be patient a little longer.

Emails are not being sent correctly and OpenID is not working.

Unfortunately they are quite major things, i realise. I have asked HostingRails to look into it. Very sorry for the inconvenience, especially to our OpenID users who will be unable to log in just now.

I am pleased to tell you that MyChores finally appears to be restored and working.

However, the bad news is that the backup from Tuesday failed to restore, so they have rolled us back to Monday. This is sub-optimal, i know, and i am sorry. It means you will have to tick tasks that you have done this week. If you created any new tasks this week you may need to create them again. A few people who signed up to MyChores this week have been lost. I will email them personally to apologise and invite them to sign up again if they wish to.

Again, i am dreadfully sorry to those of you who rely upon MyChores and missed it whilst it was away. I switched to HostingRails in the hope that outages like this would not occur. Whilst it was a rather exceptional event to bring down the entire system, i am surprised that they were not better prepared for recovery. In my opinion they have failed us.

Anyway, we are back now, and i extend my further apologies for the 36 hours unavailability. If anyone needs any help rescheduling tasks that have gone overdue, let me know.

I am so sorry for the downtime that has been ongoing for more than 24 hours. Whilst this journal is recovered, the actual MyChores site is not yet back. I feel awful about this; i know there are people who rely on MyChores on a daily basis. All i can do is apologise.

I switched to HostingRails in the hope of avoiding long outages like this. The company have a 24/7 customer service and they boast 99.9% uptime. What happened Tuesday night was an extremely rare situation where two drives failed, bringing down the RAID array and operating system. Apparently the blame lies with Western Digital firmware. Since that time HostingRails have been rebuilding the operating system and restoring from a backup, but it seems they had a corrupted backup image which failed at the last minute. So now they are trying a different backup image. There is a possibility of data loss when it comes back, as the image may be from a day or two ago. Unfortunately i was asleep when they were telling us to backup our data. The downside of having a host in a different time zone.

As you can imagine, a lot of confidence has been lost in HostingRails. I thought they were better prepared than this for disaster recovery. I am so sorry for the massive inconvenience that this has been to many of you, but i hope it won’t be much longer until the site is back online.

Please follow mychores on Twitter for further updates.

The wonderful people at HostingRails have set up a Sender Policy Framework for us. This means that mail from MyChores can only come from one particular server. If it does not, then it is somebody else spoofing our email address, and most email clients should simply reject it.

I am hoping this will stop the despicable spam.