I’ll admit it…I’m embarrassed that my first blog post in over 6 months is to explain a site outage. I throw myself on the mercy of the court, beg your forgiveness and vow to do better. Now, on to our feature presentation.

So, What Happened?

As many of you no doubt noticed, CPO went offline yesterday somewhere between 12:00 and 1:00 pm PST. It came back to life this morning around 4:30 am. First, I wish to apologize to all loyal CPO users for this inconvenience. I know how earth shattering it can be to rely upon a web service and then one day find out it’s GONE! So, I’m very sorry this outage occurred and I will explore ways to keep this from happening in the future.

Most of you will know this already but I’ll say it anyhow…No data was lost – none, zero, zilch. The database is intact and functioning fine. One of my other web properties, StuffSafe.com , was picked up by Lifehacker on Tuesday afternoon and traffic has spiked through the roof since then. I’m working with my hosting company to determine the exact cause of the outage but my suspicion is that there were just too many simultaneous authentication requests to the database server attached to my cheap-ass hosting account.

“Wait!”, you say. “What does StuffSafe have to do with a CPO outage?”

Well, both sites (and a few others) are hosted on the same account so the traffic spike to StuffSafe brought down everything. (Gasp from the audience and then…pin drop silence.)

“Hmmm, not very good infrastructure planning is it, Jeff.”

Yes, you would be right about that – given unlimited resources or at least a profitable business model, neither of which CPO has right now. What CPO does have in the way of resources is time and the good will of its users, but not cash.

“Ok, enough excuses. How will you keep this from happening in the future?”

I have one idea. Move StuffSafe.com to its own cheap-ass hosting account and if it spikes again, at least it won’t bring down everything else. But consider this, StuffSafe has averaged less than 500 page views per day for almost 2 years. CPO averages about 5,000 page views per day. My other 3 sites combined barely even register since I’m not actively promoting them right now. On a typical day, my hosting account deals with around 5,500 page views which is not taxing in the least.

Short of offloading a couple of sites to other hosting accounts, I’m not sure what else can be done at this point. I’m open to suggestions if some of you have dealt with this problem before – specifically, large traffic spikes on cheap hosting accounts coupled with the inability to afford a more robust infrastructure.

Again, I apologize for the downtime and the heart failure. Thanks for reading.

Jeff

First, allow me to apologize for the long delay between posts. I've been trying to be responsive to the forum posts that have been coming in while also picking away at some new features.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is to simply say that invoice editing now works as it should. A bug that prevented an accurate invoice total while editing an invoice has been haunting CPO for the past 2 weeks. I believe this problem has been fixed but, of course don't hesitate to let me know if you experience problems.

I appreciate everyone's patience as this problem was sorted out.

Thanks for reading.

CPO user SebyM was kind enough to alert me to some pretty significant problems with the invoice editing features. Here's what's happening...

1. A user creates a new invoice - everything works just fine at this step.
2. The user goes back to edit the invoice.
3. Invoice edits work fine unless you remove invoice items while simultaneously editing the tax rate.
4. If you remove items from an invoice while editing, the invoice total is no longer accurate and really can't be changed by the user. Even removing all items and starting from scratch won't give an accurate invoice total.

I've looked into this bug today and found that it's a bit of a monster. There is so much code involved and not all of it is really clean. So, my thought right now is that this will take me through the weekend to fix properly. Until next week, don't plan on doing any serious edits to invoices or you may wind up having to delete them and start over.

Ok, now that the confession is out of the way, I'd like to express a tremendous amount of appreciation to a few bug watchers. Yanick Rochon, Maurer Sebastian and Greg Manset - you guys are terrific! Thanks a million for sticking with CPO and taking time out of your busy day to help me identify problems and suggest great improvements.

CPO has grown much faster than I ever could have imagined and, right now, I'm scrambling a bit to keep up. It's a pleasure to have some users who will graciously point out problems without just giving up and leaving.

Thanks so much, guys. I hope I can do something nice for you one of these days soon.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

So I've had a couple of questions recently concerning IE support on CreativePro Office. Currently, the layout breaks in IE 6 and 7 and there are some JavaScript issues with IE as well - surprise, surprise! And CreativePro Office hasn't even been tested on Safari yet.

Yes, I do intend to support both Safari and IE (6 and 7) in the near future. So, what's the holdup? Well first of all, CPO is in beta (some might even say alpha) release which means things are changing and changing daily. Also, when building any web app, I prefer to work exclusively in Firefox as do most folks. Once the layout and JavaScript behaviors are nailed down in FF and I'm happy, then I know how things are supposed to work. I've found that testing in multiple browsers as I develop is a massive waste of time because the testing scenario usually goes something like this:

1. Build layout in Firefox.
2. Test layout in IE - find that it breaks.
3. Fix layout for IE.
4. Tweak some styles, elements, JavaScript, etc. in Firefox to accommodate changes made for IE.
5. Test layout in Safari - find that it breaks, though not nearly as bad as IE.
6. Throw out an entire chunk of the UI or JavaScript code make way for new features.
7. Go back to #1 and repeat.

So until users are satisfied with a stable release of CPO, plan on using CreativePro Office with Firefox on a Mac or PC. I'm sorry if this presents an inconvenience and look for enhanced browser support some time in May of 2007.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

OK, here we go. The CreativePro Office beta officially launches today - no more putting it off. I missed my original launch date by 2 months but a lot of good stuff has happened in that time...

• Tasks and milestones can now be added to projects,
• Tasks can be viewed as a Gantt chart,
• Files can be uploaded to projects,
• Multiple users (employees, contractors, administrators) can now be added to a CPO account,
• An integrated bug reporting tool has been added,
• The app was converted to PHP 5 and lots of code was refactored.

• The client area needs a lot of work. The client area allows your clients to login with credentials that you assign and view their projects, invoices and public project files.
• Invoice editing has a JavaScript bug that incorrectly calculates the invoice total when tax or shipping is included.
• The tasks dashboard widget needs to be built.
• The task Gantt chart feature has some formatting issues.
• The Office Search feature needs to be completed.