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.

If you go to YackTrack.com today, you might notice some minor differences. First, if you are not logged on to YackTrack, you will no longer see the Dashboard tab. I did not like the idea of a tab that did nothing and just redirecting you to the Login page. It just felt awkward to me. Since I am making a push towards better usability and a better overall design, I figured the Dashboard should only appear when the user is authenticated. In order to make it obvious that running a query can be saved, you will now see a nice reminder to register or login if you are not authenticated.

This also makes it a little more obvious to those people who are not registered, that there is some benefit to registering. The other user interface changes are all regarding authentication. So, if you click the login, register or change password links, you now get a modal dialog instead of the nasty page-based form. I figured that these changes are fairly minor from the user experience perspective and did not require some big redesign release. The other benefit of using the modal dialog is that it will refresh the page you were on. So, if you had just searched for something, the results will be refreshed and you have the nice save link at the top of the results. Again, this is a minor tweak, but I think it makes a difference.

In addition to the user interface tweaks, I have added support for Reddit and partial support for Google Reader for all URL searches. I am still trying to determine the best way to integrate Google Reader, but for now the Google Reader support uses the RSSmeme API to gather the shared notes.

As usual, if you have any requests, suggestions or problems, just let me know. You can find me on Twitter, or the YackTrack Twitter account, or the GetSatisfaction forum.

YackTrack - Follow the Conversation!

In the current issue of Inc Magazine, there is an article about customer feedback. The basic idea is that customers tend to be vocal about the products they use and buy:

Whether they are out-of-control cranks or out-of-the-blue evangelists, customers want to have their say. And if you won’t listen to them, the Internet is teeming with people who will.

Obviously, this has spawned a number of online tools to collect reviews (Yelp.com), centralize customer service (GetSatisfaction.com) or just find what is being said about your brand. One of those tools is my own YackTrack.com. I am happy to say that Inc Magazine named YackTrack the “best tool for following blog chatter”. Yelp and GetSatisfaction were also highlighted in their niches.

Given that they also mentioned two drawbacks to YackTrack, I wanted to quickly address these. First, YackTrack only displays the most recent posts. This is mainly done due to the number of results some queries return. Once I find a good presentation paradigm for large result sets, I will gladly give you the option to see more than only recent results.

Second, Searches that “yield plentiful results” are slow or sometimes result in an error. These items were addressed in the recent update of YackTrack earlier this month. I am finding that people are sometimes using YackTrack to look at larger “brands” like apple, google or even iphone. I did not expect this to happen, so originally I did not have any optimizations for such large result sets. I have made changes to fix this problem, and hopefully you are not seeing any errors when trying to find mentions of your brands.

So, thank you to the folks at Inc Magazine and all of the YackTrack users who continuously promote the tool. Getting accolades from you and a magazine definitely encourage me to improve and build upon the base we already have. Thanks again, and I hope I can keep all of you using YackTrack!

I know everyone must have thought that YackTrack was just another tool that got no love from its owner. This is very far from the truth. The truth is that my summer was crazy busy, and some of the new stuff was just taking far longer than I had hoped.

YackTrack Dashboard

So, what’s new in this release? First, there are a bunch of minor tweaks that I will not list as you probably will not really notice. The main feature that was added was user registration. By allowing registration, we now have a dashboard where you can save your searches as well as register a blog. I have a lot of plans for the dashboard, but I figured it was more important to get the first version out before too long. The dashboard has the list of queries that you have saved and the blogs that you have registered. If you register a blog, YackTrack will get RSS updates from your blog, detect new posts and save them as queries. That way, you just need to go to your dashboard to see all of your current searches.

[UPDATE] Ack! I totally forgot to mention that all of the account related stuff is now in the upper right corner of the page. If you are not logged in, there are Login and Register links. When you do logon, you will see a nice greeting, the My Account link where you can change your display name and timezone, the Change Password link and the Logout link.

I am sure that you are wondering whether that is everything. I understand it has been a few months since the last update. However, this is what you get today. The next release which will be coming quicker than “a few months” will be a redesign of the user interface. Currently, the interface is very limiting in what I can do, so I want to prettify it and generally make it easier to user. If you have any user interface requests, I will gladly consider them.

Two other minor points to add are related to customer service. First, YackTrack has its own Twitter account now. Thankfully, the username is just yacktrack, so no thinking is needed to find it. I was thinking that the Twitter account could be used for quick questions and basic contacts. The second customer service item is that you can now find YackTrack on GetSatisfaction.

Now that this release is done, I am going to ask for feature requests again. In the next week or two, I plan on listing what has been requested and maybe run a poll to see what people really want.

So, get out there, register your blogs and follow the conversation!

I just wanted to let the YackTrack users know that I posted an update that you hopefully will not notice. I have made some significant changes to the innards of the application. These changes should improve performance a bit (yes we are now doing some caching) as well as preparing for some big changes coming in the future. So, if you notice any problems, please let me know as soon as possible. As with any update, there is always the chance that something does not go as planned.

I also want to ask everyone how things are going. I know I do not have a ton of users, but I want to keep the ones I have very happy. Are there any features that you really want? Are there any services that I should add? Is anyone really using the service? I am planning one more “major” release in the near future, but after that point I am open to suggestions. So, if you want something, let me know now.

[UPDATE] I just noticed that the RSS feeds are “republishing” comments you may have already seen. This should only happen once until everything gets cached appropriately. I apologize for any inconvenience this causes.

[UPDATE] OK, the RSS feeds are not acting the way I want them to. I am continuously getting Technorati items and some others. I will look at this again and try to determine a better way to handle it. Again, I apologize if you receive a bunch of new items in your RSS feed that you have seen before.