Today's Meet

Service Status Updates

Those of you following TodaysMeet on Twitter may have seen a few tweets today about a styling but in Internet Explorer 8. This seems like as good a time as any to bring a new tool to your attention: Today’s Meet Service Status.

This very simple site contains short status updates, and has an RSS feed, should you need it.

I’ll be using this to post updates on the Today’s Meet service when I’m either in a place where I can’t write a full blog post, or when I’d rather concentrate on fixing the issue and explain it later. It will be the first, best place to look during outages, both planned and unplanned. Both the status feed and this blog now run on a server separate from Today’s Meet itself,

Eventually, I may configure the status updates to cross post to Twitter, but for now you’ll just have to subscribe to the feed.

For those of you interested in the details of the bug, follow me below the break. read more…

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

A few weeks ago, visitors to Today’s Meet were greeted, not with the regular interface, but with a cryptic message warning that it was, in fact, very dark. They were likely to be eaten by a grue.

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Zork games? No? It doesn’t really matter.

The issue was caused by the database server. Specifically, it wasn’t running: MySQL failed to start with the system after a routine weekly restart.

Unfortunately, the monitoring I had in place at the time only checked that there was a response from the web server, since the database had been 100% reliable until that incident. The new monitoring checks the database server directly.

More unfortunately, there seems to have been some data loss at the time, which wasn’t noticed until more recently. I deeply apologize to those affected by the data loss. I know what a blow that can be. I have extended the life of my rolling database backups to provide more insulation against this type of thing.

I hope this will not happen again, and I hope that this transparency is appreciated, and that you will continue to use Today’s Meet.

Tweak to Room Names

Today’s Meet rooms are no longer case senstive. I originally intended this as a small privacy feature, but what I’ve seen is people getting confused and creating duplicate rooms, splitting up their group. So now http://todaysmeet.com/TodaysMeet and http://todaysmeet.com/todaysmeet will get you into the same room. read more…