Everything should now be working properly. We have learned a lot from this experience, overall I think our backup plans worked pretty well considering we were able to get back and running while most of Amazon was still down and none of your data was lost or damaged.
There are a few things we will be looking into so that we can fall over to our backup system a little quicker.
If anyone is still having issues just let us know.
Mike
It seems that 24 hours later Amazon.com still has not fully recovered from their world wide outage. Since we are on their servers we were also affected. Amazon is still down but we have migraded to our backup plan. Here is an article that talks a little more about the outage and what sites were affected: http://j.mp/huhY8A
We are running off of our backup systems until this is straightened out, everything seems to be working properly except for 2 items:
We will keep you up to date with more information as we get it.
Thanks for your patience.
Today we experienced a service disruption, this is a rare event and we apologize for any inconvenience. Just like yourself we depend on this system and we require it to be up 27-7 too.
Here is a what happened. We host all of our servers with Amazon.com, we have found that they have the highest availability of any hosting provider and if there is an issue they fix it promptly. If the servers are good enough for Amazon.com, one of the highest trafficted sites in the world, it is good enough for us. This morning Amazon.com experienced an outage that also brought down our servers. As soon as we saw the issue we moved to our backup servers, no data was lost or damaged. We are still operating off of our backup servers and we hope to move to our faster production servers as soon as we finish our testing.
Here is the breakdown of what Amazon.com experienced (based off of their status page: http://status.aws.amazon.com/)
1:41 AM PDT We are currently investigating latency and error rates with EBS volumes and connectivity issues reaching EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region.
2:18 AM PDT We can confirm connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances and increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Increased error rates are affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We continue to work towards resolution.
2:49 AM PDT We are continuing to see connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances, increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region, and increased error rates affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We are also experiencing delayed launches for EBS backed EC2 instances in affected availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. We continue to work towards resolution.
3:20 AM PDT Delayed EC2 instance launches and EBS API error rates are recovering. We're continuing to work towards full resolution.
4:09 AM PDT EBS volume latency and API errors have recovered in one of the two impacted Availability Zones in US-EAST-1. We are continuing to work to resolve the issues in the second impacted Availability Zone. The errors, which started at 12:55AM PDT, began recovering at 2:55am PDT
5:02 AM PDT Latency has recovered for a portion of the impacted EBS volumes. We are continuing to work to resolve the remaining issues with EBS volume latency and error rates in a single Availability Zone.
6:09 AM PDT EBS API errors and volume latencies in the affected availability zone remain. We are continuing to work towards resolution.
6:59 AM PDT There has been a moderate increase in error rates for CreateVolume. This may impact the launch of new EBS-backed EC2 instances in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Launches of instance store AMIs are currently unaffected. We are continuing to work on resolving this issue.
We hope this sheds light on what happened, if you have any specific questions please let us know.
-Mike
Did you know that you can add tasks into Get It Done just by talking into your phone? There is a great app called reQuall which integrates nicely with Get It Done.
The first thing you will need is your individual Get It Done email address found in the settings of Get It Done. Remember this because you will have to use it on the reQuall site.
The next thing you will need to do is create a reQuall account:
Once you are signed up go into the settings of reQuall and enter your Get It Done address in the email field:
Next go into the Notification category in reQall settings and make sure the 'Send me a transcript of new auto items by email' is checked off.
The final step is to download the reQall app for your iPhone, Blackberry, or Android device. This should be available in their respective app stores. When you add something through this app it will transcribe it for you and send the results to your Get It Done account automatically.
And thats it, is you have any problems setting this up let us know!
Our 7th maintenance release of your 3.0 version is out today. This release is mostly bug fixes and some speed improvements. As always Android is available now as an update in the Market and we are waiting on Apple to approve our iPhone and iPad apps (this usually takes about a week). Here is what changed:
Change Log Version 3.0.7
Mobile Apps
Web App
We have a small update today, you can now preview your Evernote thumbnails right from your account:
If you missed our previous post, this is how you can view your Evernote notebooks in Get It Done
Hope you enjoy, if you have any issues let us know!
We have 2 new features we would like to show off today.
Task counts in the web app
If you are using a modern web browser like Google Chrome, Apple Safari, or Firefox, you will notice you can get a quick view of your task counts next to each focus. We added this in the mobile apps already and it finally made it into the web app. The green box is the number of tasks and the red is the number of overdue tasks:
Evernote Integration
For those Evernote users out there, we have had many requests to have Get It Done import your Evernote notebooks into the app. If you don't know what Evernote is, it is a popular app which makes it easy for you to collect notes and files.
If you are an Evernote user we make it quick and easy to view your evernotes in Get It Done.
To enable Evernote go into your settings in Get It Done and click plugins and click 'Enable Evernote integration':
You should now see 'Login to Evernote' and a new category 'Evernote Notebooks'
When you click this you will need to login to Evernote so that we can access your information:
After you do this you will need see your notebooks under the 'Evernote Notebooks' category along with your projects and focuses:
When you click on one of your notebooks you will see all of the notes in that particular notebook. If you taged any of the notes in the Evernote application you can filter the notes by clicking on the tab at the top of the page :
Finally when you click on a particular note you will see it in Get It Done:
And that's it. This is our initial push for Evernote integration, we want to see how people use this feature so we can plan a deeper integration with this and other apps.
Hope you enjoy!
Android version 3.0.5 released today. The big feature is 'Native Scrolling'. For some Android devices scrolling can be a little slow, for those people we introduced better 'Native' scrolling feature. We also tapped into the Android Menu and Back buttons, this should make for a better all around Android experience. There is also stability and speed improvements across all mobile apps.
As always Android in the market today, iPhone/iPad will be a few days while we wait for Apple to approve the app.
Change log
Version 3.0.5
Mobile Apps
Web App
I wanted to share an email I sent today to someone who was asking how to use Get It Done for their particular case. Many of you might find it useful:
Mike,
I need help in determining how to best use the app. I have numerous tasks and projects. From the Allen book, I was thinking about the follow categories: Two broad categories for Professional and Personal. Within these two domains, structure the following areas...Computer work; Telephone Calls; Errands; Office; Someday; Reference; Delegated; Waiting For
I have numerous complex projects for which I am responsible, including dissertations, research projects, manuscripts, and other administrative responsibilities. I am trying to organize my emails in the same fashion that I will set up my system in Getitdone. Help!
In your case I would do the following, I will start with the most broad category and then move down from there:
Create 2 'Areas of Responsibility'. Areas are the broadest category and when you are in a particular Area you will only see tasks and projects pertaining to the particular Area.
http://getitdoneapp.com/blog/areas-of-responsibility/
Within each Area you can further separate your tasks into projects. Projects are a group of tasks that need to get done to accomplish a particular goal:
http://getitdoneapp.com/blog/how-to-manage-projects/
Some projects in 'Work' Area might be:
Some projects in 'Home' Area might be:
Projects are set up so that each individual Project will have its own Inbox, Today, Next, and Someday folders. This is done automatically. To learn about these focuses:
http://getitdoneapp.com/blog/how-to-use-get-it-done-to-get-organized/
If you are 'Waiting for' or 'Delegating' tasks to someone else you should set up different People. I set up People with the following names:
http://getitdoneapp.com/blog/sharing-tasks-with-people/
If that particular person has a Get It Done account they will see the task in their Inbox, if they do not have an account it is a general bucket for your own records. If you enter an email address they will be sent a message asking to join Get It Done.
Tags are an even finer way you can organize your tasks. A few ways you might use tags:
Tags are very flexible and might be different for each project.
I think this is a good starting point for you. The system is very easy to use once you dive into it. You should probably start setting up the app in a fashion similar to this and if you have any questions let me know.
We have a minor bug fix build today for you today. Android is in the market and we are still waiting on 3.0.3 to be approved by Apple, hopefully you will see it in the App Store in the next few days.
We have been hard at work on a bigger update to the mobile apps to improve speed (especially scrolling) and to bring more of the Web App features to the mobile versions, stay tuned!
Change Log
Version 3.0.4
Mobile App
Web app