User activism

It is good to have skrbl released.
It is better to get people into the skrbl habit.
But it is really great to have users involved to the point where they -
give us feedback,
provide constructive criticism
come up with feature requests
& spread the word through their friends, blogs etc.

We appreciate your using skrbl, and will continue to work on improving skrbl's usefulness to you.
Thank you all, and a happy New Year.

One page to rule them all

Last night we merged the 'my sessions' feature with the 'my accounts' page. The end product is (*NEW IMPROVED*) my skrbls.

One place to manage your whiteboards and your skrbl account.
What this means for you - One less button on your skrbl session, Your account and skrbl whiteboards related information aggregated in one place, another step towards ease and simplicity.
The 'my skrbls' page is quite functional, currently you can - manage your skrbls, make your sessions private OR public, set password for individual sessions, create new sessions...

That's just for starters, we have plans for the 'my skrbls' page and of course, additional session tracking information (as promised).
Ta.

Managing skrbls

Users can now manage their skrbls from their 'My Account' page.

The page lists all your skrbl sessions. You can see which are flagged private (for your eyes only), and you can manage session privacy with an easy check box.

More info will be added to the skrbl list - visitor count, date of last update, tags... for now. More features are planned for the 'My Account' page, if you have suggestions please tell us.

That's it for today, keep on skrbling.

Personal notes

We switched on the 'private' feature today.
With a simple check mark on your 'My Account' page, you can switch any of your skrbl sessions from public to private (and vice versa). Other users cannot 'join' a private skrbl session. It is your personal skrbl and accessible only through your login.

My skrbl is open all the time (naturally!), I organize my information across sessions but I also have one session that I use as a scratchpad (conveniently titled 'scratchpad' :). I use it to take down phone numbers, tasks, messages,... any little scrap of text that I need to remember. No scrambling for pen & paper, and as a bonus I've cut down on my 'stickie' habit.

The notes are on skrbl so I can always get my hands on them, and my scratchpad is flagged 'private' so no one else can.

December 17 and all is well

Things are settling down finally, whew!
Thank you for your patience and understanding.

We still have a long todo list, and will be handling some of these by tomorrow - like the FAQ (we are putting it up tomorrow night) and the feedback page (thank you for writing), we will respond to all queries, thats a promise.

To apply changes we will take a small planned maintenance stop tomorrow - December 18th. 11.59 PM EST (UTC -5). skrbl will not be available for a few minutes.

Thank you all, over and out.

Shaken & Stirred

DNS Snafu. Ouch, argh and @#%#@!
Rushed through the move to the new location, cut corners (real coders don't test?), managed to get the new hardware set up et al, but ...
Stale records on the Name server, self referential infinite loops, duplicate zones, stealth nameservers and more such stuff conspired to keep the site inaccessible. No one could get to www.skrbl.com though http://skrbl.com was accessible at times. And until today I didn't even know the 2 URLs resolve independently.

Guess this was a consequence of our rushed move, but I believe it could have been fixed much sooner, but the network guys automatically assumed the problem was 'standard DNS propagation delay', sigh!

Moral of the story - assume nothing.
And here's a great resource for anyone with DNS problems.

Band Aids

As some of you noticed, skrbl was down for a while earlier tonight.
We've moved to a new data center and are set up on new hardware. More work remains to be done, but we are back to normal (until the next crisis -;).

Thank you for your patience.

Making Buzz

Ajaxian posted about skrbl yesterday, (thanks guys). It's been hectic since.

Frankly we were caught by surprise, we were planning a move to a new data center next week with increased bandwidth and server capacity. With the move so close we'd put off code deployment and house cleaning until after setting up on the new boxes in the new location. In fact we haven't even taken the covers off our 'ahem ahem' corporate site.

Not that we are complaining (thanks again Dion Almaer & the Ajaxians, more power to you), we are buzzed that we got 'ajaxianed' (or maybe the buzz is from all the caffeine).
We are trying to schedule an earlier move, and also trying to upload some of the changes before the move. We absolutely need to move to resolve the service issues.

Meanwhile, please bear with us.