Our planned outage to upgrade our key database server lasted much longer than plan. It was caused by a known, but expected error during the upgrade. The systems were down for so long because we kept trying to complete the process.
In the end, we gave up on the upgrade and restarted the systems. At no time any information was at risk of loss. We had good backups for everything; they were not needed.
Thank you for your patience.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Diary and Photo Updates
Diary feature of eWoFF is used by many people on a regular basis. It serves as a good platform for private, shared, or privately shared journal or diary.
Some users had complained that they were sporadically unable to save their diary entry. It was likely a result of the timeout of session on the server side. Now, diary entries are automatically saved every 15 seconds as they are being created. The rich text editor in the diary was available for a while. However, it was hidden and it required an extra click to display the rich text options. Most users are using rich text for their journal, so the options are now shown by default.
Prior to the latest update, it was time-consuming to edit titles and descriptions of the photos. You had to go into each photo one at a time after you upload them. A new list view in the photo edit space allows you to edit titles and description of all photos in an album from a single screen. Titles are important on photos because they are used as subject line for conversations related to the photo. eWoFF.com is great platform to privately share photos with your family and friends!
Some users had complained that they were sporadically unable to save their diary entry. It was likely a result of the timeout of session on the server side. Now, diary entries are automatically saved every 15 seconds as they are being created. The rich text editor in the diary was available for a while. However, it was hidden and it required an extra click to display the rich text options. Most users are using rich text for their journal, so the options are now shown by default.
Prior to the latest update, it was time-consuming to edit titles and descriptions of the photos. You had to go into each photo one at a time after you upload them. A new list view in the photo edit space allows you to edit titles and description of all photos in an album from a single screen. Titles are important on photos because they are used as subject line for conversations related to the photo. eWoFF.com is great platform to privately share photos with your family and friends!
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Our Press Release
As everything is starting to come together nicely for eWoFF.com, we made the following press release yesterday. Over the coming days, you will see many new features and activities around eWoFF.com and other sites of the eWoFF Network.
eWoFF.com Offers Reprieve from the Noise of the Internet
Chicago, IL, USA, December 3, 2008
eWoFF.com, Your Web of Family and Friends, offers a simple way to stay in touch with family and friends without the noise and invasiveness of the Internet.
eWoFF.com is upgraded and re-launched to deliver the original promise of the site from 1999. The primary driver for the revival of eWoFF.com is the fact that the social networking sites seem to introduce more and more noise and friction between you and your family and friends. Rather than a social networking site, eWoFF.com is a private networking site for family and friends. While many people have the time and need to meet up with strangers, like minded or otherwise, most just want keep up with the people that they already know.
Privacy sets eWoFF apart from most other sites. The site allows you to create a one to one links with your family and friends to share photos, conversations, whereabouts, diaries, and much more. eWoFF.com allows the users to start a conversation while viewing any photos, diaries, whereabouts, favorites, or other content. It is a richer experience to quickly react to a cute photo or an reflective diary entry.
The Diary feature of the eWoFF has been very popular. Most people prefer the private diaries over public blogs. The Photo Albums offer a simple yet powerful way to create albums and share them with your family. The Whereabouts function does not try to be a calendar. Rather, it is simple way to share your whereabouts with your family and friends. The Favorites function works well to save and share recipes, websites, movies, and more. In addition to viewing contact information of your family and friends that they have shared with you, the site allows you to maintain your own list of contacts.
With new members signing up at a fast pace and old members returning in larger number, the updated eWoFF.com is headed for a strong presence in the sites for family and friends.
eWoFF Network is sites and services for family and friends. eWoFF Network is owned a operated by eWoFF.com, Incorporated, an Illinois (USA) corporation. The sites of eWoFF Network include eWoFF.com, WeightChart.com, nvytr.com, ThinkingOfYouNow.com, and eShareNow.com.
-----------------------------------------
The press release is available at these and many more sites:
PRLog.org
Free-Press-Release.com
1888PressRelease.com
eWoFF.com Offers Reprieve from the Noise of the Internet
Chicago, IL, USA, December 3, 2008
eWoFF.com, Your Web of Family and Friends, offers a simple way to stay in touch with family and friends without the noise and invasiveness of the Internet.
eWoFF.com is upgraded and re-launched to deliver the original promise of the site from 1999. The primary driver for the revival of eWoFF.com is the fact that the social networking sites seem to introduce more and more noise and friction between you and your family and friends. Rather than a social networking site, eWoFF.com is a private networking site for family and friends. While many people have the time and need to meet up with strangers, like minded or otherwise, most just want keep up with the people that they already know.
Privacy sets eWoFF apart from most other sites. The site allows you to create a one to one links with your family and friends to share photos, conversations, whereabouts, diaries, and much more. eWoFF.com allows the users to start a conversation while viewing any photos, diaries, whereabouts, favorites, or other content. It is a richer experience to quickly react to a cute photo or an reflective diary entry.
The Diary feature of the eWoFF has been very popular. Most people prefer the private diaries over public blogs. The Photo Albums offer a simple yet powerful way to create albums and share them with your family. The Whereabouts function does not try to be a calendar. Rather, it is simple way to share your whereabouts with your family and friends. The Favorites function works well to save and share recipes, websites, movies, and more. In addition to viewing contact information of your family and friends that they have shared with you, the site allows you to maintain your own list of contacts.
With new members signing up at a fast pace and old members returning in larger number, the updated eWoFF.com is headed for a strong presence in the sites for family and friends.
eWoFF Network is sites and services for family and friends. eWoFF Network is owned a operated by eWoFF.com, Incorporated, an Illinois (USA) corporation. The sites of eWoFF Network include eWoFF.com, WeightChart.com, nvytr.com, ThinkingOfYouNow.com, and eShareNow.com.
-----------------------------------------
The press release is available at these and many more sites:
PRLog.org
Free-Press-Release.com
1888PressRelease.com
Saturday, November 29, 2008
New features and updates
Things are starting to come together nicely. Significant new features are being rolled out and there is good progress on marketing.
We have just added rich text to diary and some other spaces. There has been a lot of traction on the diary features of eWoFF. Many users are using primarily the diary space on a daily or every 2-3 day basis.
We are rolling out a big update to the photo space this week. It will make the space much easier to use while retaining all of the personal features. The new features include drag and drop, album edit, multi-photo upload, and an updated sharing space.
The Google campaigns for eWoFF are starting to work. We have scores of 9 and 10 for many useful keywords in diary and family space.
We have just added rich text to diary and some other spaces. There has been a lot of traction on the diary features of eWoFF. Many users are using primarily the diary space on a daily or every 2-3 day basis.
We are rolling out a big update to the photo space this week. It will make the space much easier to use while retaining all of the personal features. The new features include drag and drop, album edit, multi-photo upload, and an updated sharing space.
The Google campaigns for eWoFF are starting to work. We have scores of 9 and 10 for many useful keywords in diary and family space.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Look and Feel Matters Most!
After a slow start with the updated eWoFF site, we are surprised at the difference attributable to a refresh of the look and feel. We hired a company on elance to provide us with a graphic design update. Even though we were not sure if their design was the greatest, we deployed it on the site because it was a great step forward.
Almost immediately, our bounce rates fell and our conversion rate went up sharply! As we updated in application pages for the members, the amount of content that is being created also went up.
With our refreshed look and marketing campaigns getting tuned, everything is coming together very nicely.
Almost immediately, our bounce rates fell and our conversion rate went up sharply! As we updated in application pages for the members, the amount of content that is being created also went up.
With our refreshed look and marketing campaigns getting tuned, everything is coming together very nicely.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
AdWords Mysteries
Even though we do not display any advertisements on our site, we do depend on PPC traffic to seek our members.
As we started to pilot the new version of eWoFF.com, we created accounts to get PPC traffic at Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Yahoo and MSN have been predictable and somewhat successful. However, we just cannot seem to sort through the mysteries of Google AdWords! We thought that we were technically competent to setup and sort through Google AdWords. We are only now realizing that our technical tinkering may have broken us for good with Google!
We invite any feedback on our learning of Google AdWords! Given that we have not yet made with Google, some of what is here may not apply! Here is what we have learned so far:
a. Do not use any complex DHTML on your landing pages! Before we even started to setup the various landing pages, our home page was totally unreadable by AdsBot (the special robot to scan for quality of landing pages for AdWords accounts)! You cannot really see what AdsBot sees, but you can guess by what GoogleBot sees! Nearly all of the text on our pages was asynchronously served from web services. Bad idea! This little fella never waited for the stuff to be served!!
b. Never have any important landing page be served to two different URLs that Google crawls! We do not know how they do it, but they link a page to only one URL Our home page used to be served to http://beta.eWoFF.com and we forgot to remove the DNS listing for beta host when we started serving this page at http://www.eWoFF.com. Bad idea! Google kept the old keep the old page as our home page until we removed the beta host entry! Same problem bit us a second time, when we continued to serve eWoFF.com site at WebofFamily.com.
c. Once your campaigns go bad, they do not turn around. At least not in days or weeks! As we improve the quality of the landing pages, it is better to try to setup new campaigns for these improved pages. It is a hopeless venture to tune campaigns that have gone bad!
More to come!
As we started to pilot the new version of eWoFF.com, we created accounts to get PPC traffic at Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Yahoo and MSN have been predictable and somewhat successful. However, we just cannot seem to sort through the mysteries of Google AdWords! We thought that we were technically competent to setup and sort through Google AdWords. We are only now realizing that our technical tinkering may have broken us for good with Google!
We invite any feedback on our learning of Google AdWords! Given that we have not yet made with Google, some of what is here may not apply! Here is what we have learned so far:
a. Do not use any complex DHTML on your landing pages! Before we even started to setup the various landing pages, our home page was totally unreadable by AdsBot (the special robot to scan for quality of landing pages for AdWords accounts)! You cannot really see what AdsBot sees, but you can guess by what GoogleBot sees! Nearly all of the text on our pages was asynchronously served from web services. Bad idea! This little fella never waited for the stuff to be served!!
b. Never have any important landing page be served to two different URLs that Google crawls! We do not know how they do it, but they link a page to only one URL Our home page used to be served to http://beta.eWoFF.com and we forgot to remove the DNS listing for beta host when we started serving this page at http://www.eWoFF.com. Bad idea! Google kept the old keep the old page as our home page until we removed the beta host entry! Same problem bit us a second time, when we continued to serve eWoFF.com site at WebofFamily.com.
c. Once your campaigns go bad, they do not turn around. At least not in days or weeks! As we improve the quality of the landing pages, it is better to try to setup new campaigns for these improved pages. It is a hopeless venture to tune campaigns that have gone bad!
More to come!
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