YackTrack will be taken offline soon as the servers are being patched by my ISP. I have been told that they will be offline tonight from 12AM GMT-7 until 5AM GMT-7.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. I will update this post when I receive a notice that the servers are available again.

UPDATE: The servers are up again and YackTrack is back to normal. Thank you for your patience.

I am sure that many regular readers of this blog are wondering what happened to YackTrack. Well, nothing really happened to it, except that I have been trying to implement the newest feature, email notifications!

Yacktrack Notification Settings

Now you can log into your account and configure three settings. First, your email address must be a valid email account. If not, then obviously you will not receive any emails. Your email notification format is a default setting for your account and can be either Text or HTML. There are also settings for the notification frequency for your chatter queries and your blogs . You can receive email notifications when we see changes, the “Instant” option, or as part of a daily email, the “Daily” option. The recommended settings are to receive HTML emails with “Instant” notifications for your chatter queries, and daily digests for your blog posts.

Your chatter queries and blogs also have the same notification settings so that you can get different notifications for different queries if you wanted. At this time, you will need to change your account settings for the notifications as well as go to your queries and blogs and make the notification changes. This was done due to the fact that a majority of users only have 1 or 2 chatter queries and blogs that they follow.

I apologize for the lack of status regarding YackTrack, and I would love to know what type of information you would like to hear about. I know I tend to post status only when new features are being released, and for many of you that may not be enough. If you would like to see more information from or about YackTrack, please let me know or send an email to support@yacktrack.com.

Lastly, if you have any requests for new features or other general feedback, please do not hesitate to send support@yacktrack.com an email. I always love hearing from YackTrack’s users.

Well, it only took a year for me to finally get to redesign the YackTrack interface. I am sure you are saying “it is about time!”, and I would agree with you. Hopefully, you like the new look as I was trying to make the site more usable instead of the “data dump” layout that it had previously. So, on the search pages, you will see new groupings by service for the comments. In some cases, the comments (or likes) are coming from FriendFeed, in other cases they come from the source service.

YackTrack Chatter Redesign

As you can see there are some other changes on that page (you can click the image to see it full size). First, you will see that above the search results, there are two pieces of information, what you searched for and something called “Yackability”.

Yackability is YackTrack’s attempt to measure how much conversation is occurring for a particular search. It is a measure of the number of votes and comments on each service that YackTrack supports. For each service, the number of comments and votes or likes are included as well. This number may not equal what you see as YackTrack searches only return the most recent search results. However, all votes and comments are not created equal. Mostly, the votes required to make a difference is highly dependent on the amount of traffic a site gets. Obviously, I will not go into detail as I do not want to give away the “secret sauce”. Also, the Yackability index will be updating for a while today, so do not get upset when you see your blog post with a Yackability of zero.

YackTrack Dashboard Redesign

The dashboard has changed as well in order to keep a consistent look on the site. Again you can see the collapsible sections and the content has been reorganized. The Queries section only holds the Chatter queries and those blog posts that are not linked directly to a blog that you have registered. The Blogs section holds your blogs and the posts grouped by month. Obviously, the table for high volume blogs will still be large, but this is a big improvement from the old version of the dashboard. Again, the Yackability measure is included for each Chatter query and each blog post.

As usual, with any update and maintenance, please let me know if you see any problems. You can always email us at support at yacktrack.com. I will be actively making minor changes and fixes over the next two weeks to ensure it is stable.

What’s Next

The next major update will likely include better Twitter integration and some performance improvements. As YackTrack has grown, the database needs to be continuously maintained. Some of this results in standard database maintenance, while others may require larger changes especially when dealing with Twitter. There will also be an update to the API at some point in order to give access to the votes, comments and Yackability index.

Otherwise, if there are features or services you would like to see integrated into YackTrack let me know as soon as possible. Just email support at yacktrack.com with any of your feedback. You can also follow us on Twitter using either @yacktrack or @robdiana. And I apologize for being such a slacker with the YackTrack Twitter account

Over the weekend I had some planned maintenance to YackTrack. If you read that post, you noticed that I had problems and updated the post a few times. I had a very detailed plan of what I needed to do, which I followed to the letter. However, regardless of how much testing I did, the maintenance did not go as planned. In particular, some of the SQL updates that I was doing were failing when applied to the application environment. Thankfully, I am comfortable with databases and was able to get around the issues, but it made me think about what could have gone wrong and what you need to do to avoid these things.

1. If you are working with code or a database, backup everything before starting. I try to take regular backups, and I did have a database backup prior to starting the maintenance. This also gives you a rollback point in case something catastrophic occurs.
2. Have a detailed plan of everything you are doing. I had several steps that I needed to complete. Some of the steps were code related and others were database related. You need to know if some of the steps can be run in a different order in case something fails. During the maintenance, there was one database script that was particularly problematic. Thankfully, none of the other scripts were dependent upon the results, so I could run the other scripts while I figured out what was wrong with the problem script.
3. Make sure the plan takes into account failure points. Where could the plan fail? Where are the logical separations between tasks? What tasks are the most likely to fail? If you start thinking about the worst case scenario, you will have planned for it.
4. Make sure you have a rollback or restore plan. What happens if you cannot recover from the failures? Hopefully, you have the previous version of the code and a database backup from point #1 above. They can now be used to restore the application and the database to its prior state. Also, try to make sure the rollback plan is as simple as possible. You do not want your rollback plan to fail.
5. Test everything in your plan. Test every task in your plan to ensure that it will run correctly.
6. Test everything in your plan again. Yes, test everything at least twice. More importantly, test your plan in the simplest possible way in the previous step, and then do performance testing in this step. This will ensure that a database update will not run for significantly longer than expected, or some other lengthy delay will not occur.
7. During the maintenance, do not get distracted. This did not happen this weekend, but I have seen it occur before. Typically, when people are updating an application there is the list of tasks that need to be completed. Sometimes, the focus on the tasks is not as complete as is necessary and things get skipped. Or in your rush to finish, you miss a detail that is very important. There is a balance needed between focus and the desire to finish so that mistakes are not made.
8. Celebrate, but not too early. When I finally completed the maintenance, I “celebrated”. I did not have a party, but I did breathe a big sigh of relief. What I did not realize was that there was a section of untested code in my Identi.ca support that was causing a defect in both the URL and Chatter searches. I saw it early for the URL search, but did not realize until the next day that Chatter searches had the same defect.
9. Do not be afraid to admit defeat or mistakes. When I saw the defect in the Identi.ca support, I quickly pulled it. There was no need to have a defect tarnishing the reputation of application when it is very simple to pull support for a service. The mistake I made was not testing that problematic section of code. I do not have 100% test code coverage, and do not plan to. However, missing this section caused problems and now I need to go back and start over with Identi.ca.
10. Learn from the problems and mistakes. I learned that I need to do two things at this point. First, I will be doing more “active” database performance management. By “active” I mean regularly checking the performance of various queries to determine possible issues. Second, I will be increasing my test code coverage. Obviously, my tests are not adequate if they let in the type of defect that caused the Identi.ca problems.

This is my list based on my experiences from this weekend. I have done this several times before, so I am definitely disappointed that it happened. Is there something I am missing? Do you have some interesting tips or tricks?

I have tried to avoid downtime as much as possible, but I can not avoid it today. YackTrack will be down this morning for some much needed maintenance from 8AM to 10AM Eastern (US) time (yes, in about an hour). There will be a minor application update as well, but externally you will not see much difference. Disappointingly, I do not have any major new features, just some minor ones and defect fixes.

Identi.ca is now supported for both URL searches and Chatter searches. [Update: In some last minute testing, I found an issue with Identi.ca and URL searches so it will not go live.] This is just the first in a long line of services that need to be added. The search crawler has been updated as there was a defect where some searches were being updated more often than others. Blog comments are being handled a bit differently as well, so there should not be issues with pulling comments for the full feed from the site. This was pointed out recently because of the Lifehacker/DownloadSquad coverage. Otherwise, this update is more about the future. There is a significant amount of database maintenance that will be done that will cause the downtime. The maintenance is some general cleanup, as well as getting the database prepared for some new features that are planned.

So, I apologize for the inconvenience of the downtime, but hopefully it will allow me to present you with a better experience long term. Thank you as always for your support.

UPDATE 12PM – The maintenance is not going well. Various database issues, mainly because I figured this would be a simple process. So, please assume that YackTrack.com will be down for the rest of the day until I resolve all of the issues. I will let everyone know more information when I figure things out.

UPDATE 6PM – The maintenance is completed! Sorry for the ridiculous delays, but databases tend to be a problem just when you don’t want them to, just like children. So, things should be back to normal. If you see any problems please let me know, or email info AT yacktrack.com, or on twitter @yacktrack.

UPDATE 1/11 7AM – I had to pull support for Identi.ca as a whole. So there is no support for URL searches or Chatter searches. I am not sure what happened as it all seemed fine during testing and the first few minutes after the updates. I guess it was just par for what was happening yesterday.