I wanted to personally apologize to you all again for the site downtime we’ve experienced this weekend. Our host experienced a perfect storm of denial-of-service attacks and software failures in one of our machines that did not get addressed until early Monday morning. The problem was unfortunately out of our control. We’re looking into how we can prevent such scenarios from occurring in the future.
Thanks for understanding. Please don’t hesitate to contact me (andrew at wejoinin dot com) if you have any further questions.
Today, April 19 @ 12:02AM GMT, our site went down for a little bit. Turns out we’ve exceeded our allotted disk space. As of 3:49AM GMT, the issue has been fixed and Wejoinin should be back to normal now. Let us know if you’re finding any issues with your sheets.
When you run a Web app like Wejoinin on minimal VPS resources (read: we’re too poor to get a beefy server), it forces you to go lean. We started to realize a year ago that our out-of-the-box Rails and nginx/Mongrel setup was starting to show its age; resource utilization would climb every so often and we’d have to kill and restart a Mongrel worker thread. Every so often the site would slow down to a crawl and we’d realize oh shoot, we’re swapping.Well, with last night’s Wejoinin push, we’ve upgraded our server environment a few ways:
We’ve switched to prgmr.com with a killer deal on a 512MiB VPS. This is a step up from the 256 slice we used to hold at Slicehost at almost half the price.
We’ve switched from vanilla Ruby to Ruby Enterprise Edition – advertised to take “33% less memory [when used with Passenger]”. It’s got a tweaked garbage collector, memory allocator and the ability to go in a tweak memory usage settings for yourself.
We’ve set up Unicorn, the new HTTP server on the block. It’s special in that each worker is in its own process, meaning that the load balancing is done natively by the OS. Also, this means that should a worker process start to get bloated, we can take it down gracefully without touching the others. Really. We can trust the OS. Plus, Git’s doing it. Plus, Hsiu-Fan has a penchant for “unconventional” deployments.
With all these tweaks, we should be seeing Wejoinin good and rarin’ to go. Let us know what you think!-Andrew
EDIT: We have completed the switch. As always, please let us know if anything is broken!
It’s been long in the works, but we are finally going through with our server transition. The last time we planned this out, there were a few server issues at our new host that made us hold off the fix. Things have stabilized recently, and we’re going to go ahead and make this happen.
Hsiu-Fan, Jason and Andrew have HENCEFORTH RESOLVED:
To peform site maintenance on Wejoinin on Sunday, March 14, from 2AM-4AM PST. Did we mention it’s pi day?
BE IT DECLARED:
That users will see minimal downtime and a nice little feature after the swap!
Thanks for your patience everyone!If you have any questions or concerns about the transition at any time, please feel free to email or .
Thank you, all of you, for your input, your comments and your support for Wejoinin. Hsiu-Fan, Jason, and I are proud to say we make something that makes people’s lives easier, be it sign-up sheets for your holiday potluck, to professor office hours, to the company party. We’ve got lots of cool things in store for 2010. From all of us at Wejoinin, we wish you a very happy new year!
Wejoinin is definitely growing–so much that we’re switching servers again!The good folks at prgmr.com have offered a killer deal on Xen VPS Web hosting that we just couldn’t pass up. In the early morning of Nov. 18, you should expect to see some minor downtime as we get the transition going.Thanks for hanging in there with us! We’ll keep you updated as best we can.
-Andrew
–Update: We’ve postponed the server transfer until we can resolve some deployment issues on our end. We’ll keep you notified with any happenings!
For the longest time people have been wondering “how can I add a little info to my signup?” Potluck signups want to brag about their world-famous chili, and sometimes you just want to express how pumped you are for the upcoming fundraiser. Look no further: we’ve added a comment field to the signup process.
Team Wejoinin wrestled long and hard over how best to allow you guys to provide some extra info on the signup sheet while keeping it simple enough that even my mom could use it. (Hi Mom!) After some thought, we ended up going with a free-form comment box, and sheet authors can just use the sheet description if there are any specific needs for the comment box. (So now you lovely pot-luckers, ask people to describe what they’re bringing in the signup comment and all should be well!)
And finally, thanks for all the feedback guys! We can’t read minds all to well, so we love hearing your raves and gripes!
Hey everyone, I’m excited to introduce a couple of new features we’ve released this week for you all:
Public sheet list views & custom usernames
Collapsible sheet sidebars
Redesigned sheet list home
New sheet administration options: copy & clear
Sleeker cell header editing
Public sheet list views & custom usernames
Many sheet creators have requested a way to get people to view a grand, big list of their sheets, all in one place. For example, we’ve had requests from professors who want their students to see all of their office hour signup sheets in one place. We’ve responded by giving you public sheet lists and custom usernames in your URLs.
How does this work? First, every user receives an autogenerated custom URL You can see what it is by logging in and checking the URL location bar in your browser.
A close-up of my location bar:
Tell all your users to go to this URL, and they’ll see a special publicly-visible view of all your sheets:
Of course, if you don’t want users to see this list of sheets, you’re under no obligation to give out your link. (And yes, we’re thinking about building in privacy features so you can choose not to display certain sheets in this view!).
If you want to change your username, you can visit the “Account” tab and change it:
It’s Voter Registration Week at UC Berkeley, and the nonpartisan UC Berkeley Vote Coalition is calling all of you who go to school there to help register other students to vote!
Lately, Hsiu-Fan, Jason and I have been getting lots of emails from our users telling us things from “I think your site is awesome!” to “Something totally broke!” We love it!
While it’s no secret that fixing broken things is nothing to cheer about, I’ve been surprised in the past couple of months at just how much I love having interactions with you all. I love that what we do makes a difference in your lives. I love that you care enough to tell us why something isn’t working. Many of you even offer us suggestions to make Wejoinin a little friendlier, and we certainly do take everything into serious consideration.
Hsiu-Fan and I get the warm fuzzies when we get small compliments from “this is really useful” to big ones like “thanks, you guys seriously saved my life!” Well, shucks.
This is also to encourage you to email us ( / ) should you find something really wonky or if you’re discovering weird behavior on your sheet or if our sheets are being terribly confusing to you (we’ll do our best to make them behave).
Once again, a warm and hearty “thanks!” from your friends here at Wejoinin,
-Andrew
Wejoinin is a way to build and share online signup sheets without having to cry. It’s a pet project of some of us here at the porkbuns initiative, a group of friends here at UC Berkeley who like to build shiny, friendly things!
If you encounter any problems, please let or know and they promise to help you out lickety-split!
Wejoinin is a way to build and share online signup sheets without having to cry. It’s a pet project of some of us here at the porkbuns initiative, a group of friends here at UC Berkeley who like to build shiny, friendly things!
If you encounter any problems, please let or know and they promise to help you out lickety-split!
