Latest News from PingLater.fm

PingLater is coming back soon!

I know it’s been ages but the wait is nearly over. Thank you everyone for your encouraging emails. I’m back! Expect PingLater.FM to be back online in a couple weeks (maybe sooner).

Unplanned downtime

Short explanation: The site is down at the moment and will be back in a few days. Thanks to everyone for submitting error reports and being patient while I work to make the site more reliable.

Long explanation: We’ve been having some unfortunate scaling issues recently due to my choice of sqlite3 as a database engine. As the site grew from a small experiment into a popular tool, a background task was locking the database for longer and longer while the pings were being processed and sent out, and as a result a lot of people have been getting a cryptic “Internal Server Error” when trying to add pings to the database or create new accounts.

I apologize that after several weeks this issue has still not been fixed (and has been getting worse). To fix this problem and ensure that future scaling issues are easier to address, I am migrating the site from Sinatra/DataMapper/SQLite3 to Rails/ActiveRecord/MySQL. Unfortunately, this is a large task that will take several days.

You can follow me on Twitter if you want to be notified when the site is once again available.

A great first week!

It’s been one week since our first day, and I’ve been quite pleased with the feedback received. A big thanks to everyone who posted to our GetSatisfaction page - your feedback made a huge difference in what I spent this week working on.

Some people had browser-related trouble, but that’s to be expected as PingLater.fm was only tested in Firefox 3.0 and 3.5b on Ubuntu prior to launch. Most of these are now fixed, at least for Firefox and Webkit users. To be honest, I don’t yet know what works and what doesn’t in Internet Explorer, but for the time being IE support is my lowest priority, as I’d rather invest my time working on features and fixes that affect the rest of us. If you use IE, I encourage you to try Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome (they’re all free and easy to install).

I’ve been working hard on the next update, which includes a complete redesign of the homepage, as well as some improvements to the dashboard and a number of backend fixes that will make the site both faster and more stable. This update will most likely be rolled out tomorrow.

Thanks for a great week!