Voo2do was down from about 3:10pm to 4:30pm EST on Tuesday, 28 Feb 2006. This was unplanned and no further downtime is expected at present. Read on for details.

If you’re trying to hit voo2do.com right now — sorry. Server trouble has caused unplanned downtime as of about 3:10PM EST today. As of 3:47PM, I am not sure what caused the problem and am waiting to reach phone support for the hosting provider. More details to come here as I can figure them out…

Update (4:33PM): My provider rebooted the machine and it seems to be running again. Nothing looks especially unusual except that the automatic reboots I requested seem to have had no effect.

Voo2do has been selected as RedOrbit’s Site of the Day. RedOrbit appears to be a news portal for science and tech, apparently created in November and doing OK but not huge traffic. Their congratulations email included a handy logo and instructions to link back to them, but voo2do isn’t featured prominently on their site; in fact, I haven’t found a “site of the day” section by browsing or searching.

Now, every website with awards for X-of-the-day is doing it partially to get links back. But if you’re publishing these awards by quoting the “winning” sites’ own descriptions in a part of your site no normal visitor will ever see, it starts to look like you’re just asking for free Google juice. Every webmaster’s gotten bogus “link exchange” requests from spam sites. Is this award just one step up from that?

And does anyone out there actually read RedOrbit?

Update: I was wrong above; there is actually a link to sites of the day from the home page of RedOrbit, under “Technology and Innovation” at left. So far (13:55 EST), it has sent 1 hit my way.

Today some reporters from the Associated Press wrote to me to inquire about the privacy issues in services like voo2do. I cobbled together responses from various user inquiries I’ve received, and out the other end came a privacy policy. It shouldn’t contain anything unexpected; as with anything in voo2do, let me know what you think.

Voo2do is mentioned in a Newsweek International article by Daren Briscoe called Smoother Surfing. It’s also a favourite of the writers at Gizmag. Thanks for the positive mentions, guys!

A couple of days ago, Voo2do was migrated to a new, faster server. While I hoped the new server would improve performance for everyone, it’s been a bumpier ride than I expected. Although the response to the speedup has been quite positive, a few users have sufferred because something is amiss in the handling of non-English characters in task names. I have had to spend way too much time responding to crises–the server has become unstable a few times, and yesterday it mysteriously lost about half of the outgoing emails required for users to confirm their accounts.

I am still working on these problems, but I’m becoming less and less optimistic. I may have to move back to the older server, which though slower has been very reliable. If you witness a slowdown in the next few days, please accept my apologies, and know that I’m determined to make voo2do faster and better. Thank you for bearing with me, and I’m sorry for the bumpy transition.

Update 2/7/06: I’ve taken care of the international characters issue, and the new server seems to be doing well. Please let me know if you experience any slow, unreliable, or buggy behavior.

Voo2do has been moved to a faster, more powerful server. I initially thought the transition was smooth but quickly discovered and fixed a couple of problems (details below). Everything should be running correctly now, so if you notice any possible problems, please email me at shimon@rura.org or call me at +1 857.928.3028.

Thank you all for making Voo2do a popular enough service to merit this upgrade, and special thanks to those who helped me find problems right after the move!

Update: Mikalai Beliashou reported that non-English characters in task names had been replaced with unreadable symbols. Unfortunately this indicated a problem in the backup/restore process that was used to move data from the old server to the new one, so I’ve had to re-do this move. Therefore, data changes — including edits, new tasks, and new user accounts — made between roughly 7:30 and 8:30pm EST have been undone.

I’m very sorry to have wiped out this data but it didn’t seem feasible to correct only the messed-up data. This meant I’d either have to restore again from the old server, wiping out an hour of usage, or leave many international users with useless task titles. Losing the hour seemed like the lesser of two evils. Apologies for the data loss.

Update 2: Email submission of tasks to voo2do was temporarily broken too; if you received a bounce notice, please try re-sending your task.

I’m speaking in a panel discussion on “Evolving Web Tools and Services” tomorrow morning in Boston.

Have you been hearing a lot about Wikis, RSS, Syndication and Aggregation, Blogs, Podcasts, and other recent web developments? Are you trying to figure out:

- What is the impact for my business?
- What old problems can be addressed with this new technology?
- What new business opportunities are now in reach?

The panel is organized by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, and also includes Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of the spreadsheet; Pito Salas, creator of BlogBridge; Kathleen Gilroy of The Otter Group; and a lawyer and an analyst, neither of whom I know.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006
8:00-11:00 a.m.
Silicon Valley Bank, 2221 Washington St. One Newton Executive Park, Newton
Cost: $60 for members or $100; I may have one free ticket to give out, so let me know if you want it
details

Update: Glen Mohr from the Otter Group has some pretty faithful notes on his blog.

A handful of users have reported problems staying logged into voo2do.com. They are prompted for the user name and password and enter those correctly, but then get this message:

- Cookies must be enabled in your browser

Strangely, this message comes up even when cookies are enabled. One user even confirmed that his browser had received and stored the cookie, but did not seem to be able to send it back to voo2do.com. The cookie contains a special code that voo2do uses to figure out who you are; so without it, you will be logged out.

But then he tried using voo2do outside the office– and it worked fine. Indeed, it seems all users experiencing these problems are coming from corporate networks. Something is getting blocked or lost somewhere, but I can’t figure out what, because I can’t figure anything out about these networks. I suspect there is a cookie blocker in some web filtering software, but I’m far from certain.

So I ask for your help: if you’ve seen this problem, and especially if you were able to fix or work around it somehow, please let me know. Just email shimon@rura.org or comment on this post.

As an added incentive, I will immediately send $20 via PayPal to the first person who provides a critical insight I can use to eliminate this problem. But any insight, even “yeah that happened to me at my office”, is helpful to me and thousands of other voo2do users.

By the way, did I mention that there are over 10,000 of you guys now? OK, most of you just dropped in to kick the tires, but that’s still pretty amazing. Thanks!

Do you like Voo2do? Do you have too much money? Donate to Voo2do!

Voo2do has been growing fast lately, and more people are writing to me with suggestions and requests. One request is getting more and more common: could you make it faster?

In my personal use of voo2do, I haven’t found it too annoyingly slow, except when saving changes to a large list of tasks. But of course as many new people sign up, my simple, cheap server is getting more loaded. It has generally been fine, getting slower under load but not crashing and burning. Still, as several users have pointed out, speed makes a big difference in this kind of web app. It’s not just aesthetic; if it takes you 1 minute to figure out what you should do during a five minute break, voo2do is charging quite a premium for whatever benefits it offers. This might well push voo2do out of the zone of being worth your while.

So I’m wondering: do you want voo2do to be faster? And for the techies out there: can you recommend (or offer?) a dedicated server hosting plan that features a fast computer and Internet uplink at a reasonable price?