Two minor (but potentially very helpful) changes to report:

1. For students who are registering a new personal folder under a school/district subscription, Personal IDs are no longer required to be unique to the entire NoodleTools community. They need only be unique to that subscriber (the school/district). This should make it a lot easier to create a personal folder with an ID that the student will remember. And administrators creating batches of student folders via the administrative interface shouldn’t run into the problem of student ID numbers that overlap with other schools.
2. In the administrative interface for school/district subscriptions, we’ve added a user history log that keeps a record of what has been done in each student’s folder. An entry in the log is created each time a student creates/edits/deletes/copies a citation or notecard, merges, shares, e-mails, copies a source list, etc. etc… This should help in a variety of situations. For example, the subscription administrator could analyze what happened when a student reports that some of their work is missing from their folder. To access the log, go to the “user management” area in the administrative interface, search for the user by his/her personal ID, and then click the “log” link in the results list. Note that we only started collecting data on 2/29, so this “30-day log” will not have 30 days worth of data until the end of March.

NoodleTools will be offline Sunday (12/30/07) starting at approximately 5:30 AM as we upgrade servers. We will keep the site offline for at least a few hours as we test the new server thoroughly. The upgrade will result in a noticable speed improvement on the Web site. Happy New Year — we look forward to working with you all again in 2008!

Update (12:45 PM PST) - This upgrade is now complete.

We’ll be taking the site offline for routine maintenance for no more than one hour starting at approximately 9:00 PM today, 12/7/07. Apologies for the late notification.

In response to the access problems yesterday and today at peak usage times, we’re implementing a series of changes this evening that we believe will help. The server may need to be restarted several times in the next few hours, so there may be limited access. The Knowledge Base and Individual Subscriber Sign-Up pages may also be offline during this time. Thank you for your continued support and understanding as we work through this frustrating issue.

Update: As of 1:00 AM PST on 11/30/07, we have completed these upgrades. The knowledge base will remain unavailable while we upgrade that script. We’ll see how it goes on Friday morning!

Final Update (11:50 AM PST 11/30/07): The server is running beautifully today, thanks to changes made last night. We do not expect any further downtime next week and beyond — we’re in good shape. Also, we have finished updating the knowledge base and that is now back online. Apologies again for the unexpected downtime this week.

Along these same lines, we will also be upgrading the NoodleTools servers over Christmas break. The exact date will be announced, but the current plan is to do the upgrade the morning of 12/30/07.

It has come to our attention that a Mozilla bug is causing a problem with dropdown menus for Mac users running Leopard OSX and FireFox version 2.0.0.9. In NoodleBib, this effects the dropdown menu that you use to select a citation type — clicking the dropdown arrow does not open the dropdown menu (although you can still use the keyboard arrow keys to traverse down the list and make a selection).

This is not something specific to the NoodleTools Web site — if you are running with this configuration, you’ll notice that certain dropdown menus (those that get built dynamically via javascript) on various Web sites just don’t…well… drop down! This is a known bug and has been fixed in the upcoming 2.0.0.10 build of FireFox (which you cannot get yet — it is due to be released in December):

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=400082

For those of you who have not updated your FireFox installation to 2.0.0.9, we recommend that you wait to update the browser until 2.0.0.10 is available in December. For those of you experiencing the issue already, you can either use the arrow keys to traverse the dropdown menu, or you can use an alternative browser for a few weeks (although you will likely experience other problems with Camino or Safari if you are trying to use the notecards feature, since we do not officially support those browsers yet). The link above also contains some information about a temporary patch, for those of you who want to try that option.

Note that this bug is only an issue on Macs running Leopard (it works on Tiger with FireFox 2.0.0.9). PC installations of FireFox are not effected either.

Update 1/5/2008: This functionality is no longer broken in the most recent FireFox update, which is 2.0.0.11. Please update your browser to this version.

We’ll be taking the site offline for routine maintenance for no more than one hour starting at approximately 9:00 PM on Saturday, 11/24/07.

Many of you have reported that the site seems to be running very slowly the past few days. We have been analyzing the problem over the last 48 hours, and it appears that a hardware change made on 11/2 is the culprit. We are in the process of replacing that hardware (a port and switch) right now, which we believe will solve this problem. Please bear with us today — we are doing everything possible to get the site up and running normally ASAP. You can check the following site for status on this issue:

http://www.noodletools.info/

UPDATE: This issue has been resolved as of 9:30 AM PST, 11/13/07. The problem was caused by a defective port at the server farm where are servers are located (not a problem with our own hardware).

We will be taking the server offline for maintenance between 8:00 and 9:00 PM PST on Saturday, November 10th. Please check noodletools.info for status updates.

Just for fun, we thought it might be interesting to see the geographical distribution of the current NoodleTools subscribers in the United States. Each pin in this map represents one NoodleTools account (where an “account” could be a single school/university, a district, or even an entire regional consortium in some cases). Individual subscribers are not displayed on this map — these are only schools, districts, etc.

We’ll take the server offline on Saturday night for one hour:

10/20/07 (9:00 - 10:00 PM PST)

On a side note, the site was running well all day today after we made a series of changes yesterday afternoon to take care of the intermittent access problems on Tuesday. Keep in mind that you can always check noodletools.info for status.