As you may know we set up a competition earlier this summer, called the Dark Theme Challenge, asking you to style your own 23 account in dark colors using the CSS theme editor. The only rule we applied, was that the photos had to be shown on a dark background.  Head judge of the competition was 23s new product designer, Benjamin.

We received some great entries. So thanks to everyone who spent a little of their summer taking part in one day making a dark theme easily available for everyone on 23.

The winning theme will form the basis of an official dark theme and made available to the entire 23 community in our collective theme pool, alongside all the other themes generated by the people on 23, using our ‘one-click’ styling engine.

So lets announce it officially!

The very talented and creative winner is…. Vibaro. Vibaro was chosen for his choice of darks that compliments his photos nicely. His great use of shading and contrasting grays and black is really elegant and makes for a solid 23 profile. Finally we like the touch of pink, he’s added to the top.

While your are waiting for us to launch an official 23 dark theme, you are of course always able to visit the winning profile, and copy his theme making your own profile take on the same dark look as his – in just one click. Do this by visiting Vibaro’s about page and clicking ‘Copy theme’.

Our runner-ups and other dark profile include:

Paulobrabo

and Ulisse

It’s time to expand the belly of The 23 Monster slightly to make room for a lot more photos in its belly. Or to put is a little more plainly, we need to add some extra hard disks to our servers.

This shouldn’t interfere too much with 23: Everyone will be able to access and browse photos on the site, but for some hours during the early morning (European time) og late night (American time) users won’t be able to upload new photos to 23.

Update: The new disks have been put in their right places and we’re ready to accept your photos again.

As a small apology for the outages in service over the past month we’ve just extended all current Plus subscriptions by three additional months.

With a slight delay we managed to conclude our service window late last night, and I wanted to write a little about what happened during those hours and why it was necessary. And also about why these changes should make for better service on 23 in the future.

The basic task during the downtime was to transfer not only our service from Amsterdam to Copenhagen, but also the physical servers! So yesterday we managed to dismantle the 23 data center, have it transported 800 kilometers, rebuild and rewire the setup and finally to prepare the servers for its new surroundings.

Why was this necessary? The are a few reasons. Firstly, we’ve had some trouble with network outages over the past months (see these forums threads) and we were not seeing the performance improvement we needed. Secondly, the new data center is another step up to be better prepared if we’re ever victim to a denial-of-service attack again. It’s close by, and it’s run by people ready to address such problems.

In the end though, the physical move was only the first step in a two-step plan to equip 23 for the future. Within the next month or so we’ll start to move our service onto new hardware, and with our current hardware already located in Copenhagen we’ll be able to make this transition with minimal downtime. All in all the result of the downtime yesterday should be less downtime in the future.

Just a quick note to let you now that we’re back online sharing photos with the world. After a long journey, 23 is now no longer hosted in nine hours away from home by car; instead it’s about ten minutes by bike. Much nicer for everyone involved.

I’ll be back with more geeky details tomorrow (haven’t slept for a while) but for now I’ll just thank you all for your patience.

We’ve just crossed the border into Denmark with the 23 servers. The site is expected to be back up again at midnight UTC.

Update: We crossed the Great Belt Bridge a few minutes ago:

Update @ midnight UTC: Things are progressing nicely in the new 23 server center. However, a few delays in getting here means that we’ll be down for at least another hour. We’re working hard to get there though.

As any reader of this blog will know, we’ve had service problems over the past three or four weeks. Even with a week-long, intensive denial-of-service attack and the resulting adjustments in our setup we’ve managed almost 99% uptime over this past month — and we’re pretty proud of that.

However, in order to be better equipped for such events in the future we’re about to make a lot of changes in both our hardware and our network setup. The upside of this change is enormous: Better response times, better service, and room for 23 to grow. But the changes also require us to shut down 23 for some hours while we lay the foundation for the new order.

So on Wednesday July 16th, 23 will be down from 10am to 10pm GMT. (That a 12-hour service window starting from 12am in Copenhagen, 11am in London, 6am in New York and 2am in California.)

We realize that this is a huge inconvenience for our users, and we will be trying to keep the window as short as possible. Also, we will do our best to alleviate problems caused by the downtime: Visitors to www.23hq.com with be greeted with a message linking to this page. All photos linked to 23 from external sites will be handled by returning af 1×1 pixel white photo. Sites including the 23 badge will not generate errors, but no content will be shown where the badge usually is. During the service window our API will be inaccessible.

We thank you for your understanding, and we stress that this scheduled downtime is a consequence of our desire to ensure the very best service for all of you.

Update: We’re getting our ducks in a row to bring 23 back online. However, a few delays means that we’ll be running a few hours over the expected downtime. We’re really sorry about that.

As the lead developer at 23 I’m often left handling and implementing the wonderful suggestions from our users. This process certainly makes 23 a much, much better photo sharing service — but at times it’s a bit overwhelming. This made is that much sweeter for me to be able to send a feature request to IkoTikashi this week, and to see him come up with a nice little helper tool for geotagging.

Geotagger basically allows you to enter an address pretty much anywhere in the world and then (by sheer magic) have geotags generated for you — ready for copy-pasting in to 23.

The tool also supports 23’s special place tags. These tags makes it easy to have multiple photos geotagged from the same place: When you first geotag a photo, include a tag such as “place:home” or “place:amalienborg“. Now, when you use the special place tag on other photos, your geotags are automatically added as well.

Remember also, that we’ve written about IkoTikashis set of tools before.

We are currently undergoing another spell of heavy ill-intended traffic from around the world. This means that a lot of you will be met with a “you have been temporarily blocked” message when you visit 23. Hopefully, we’ll be able to go back online very shortly though.

We sorry for the disruption…

Update: We had about 90 minutes of downtime over the night due another spike in traffic, but after this everything has been running smoothly. To summarize a little, we’ve just entered our sixth day of denial of service attacks from multiple sources. Such attacks are basically organized efforts to drown out real web traffic to and from service such as 23 with a lot of random traffic. Over the past four days, this has resulted in a combined downtime of about two hours, and we’re actively trying to manage the fall-out.

One of the nicest additions to the newly released 23 is the social theme editor. Where you can create your own theme, in our new one-click styling engine. You choose your favorite 2 colors, changing the primary and secondary color of your 23 account (the green color of the header and the blue link color) and customizing the look of 23 account. Your theme is added our collective theme pool, so that we can all enjoy each other’s themes. You are also able to see who and how many other users are currently using your theme.

While we’re very pleased with the styling engine, one thing is missing… The Dark Theme!

With our styling engine the background remains the same, and photos are always shown on a white background. Many people have been asking for a dark theme with photos shown on a dark background, making them pop. In the spirit of 23, where anyone can style their own account, and add personal flair, we challenge you to make the best custom dark theme ever. The rules are simple:

1. Style your own 23 account in dark colors using CSS.

2. Your styling must include a dark background behind the photos.

3. Send an email to team@23hq.com with a link to your account to enter the contest. All submissions must be in by July 14th.

The challenge will be judged by 23s new product designer, Benjamin. First thing back from holiday, Benjamin will decide on the coolest theme and appoint a worthy winner.

The 1st Prize is a 250 Euro gift certificate for Expedia, for the winner to venture out into the world with a camera, returning with a series of magnificent photos. The winning theme will in addition to being a part of the 23-themes also be included in The Tour of 23. The two runners up will each receive a gift certificate of 100 Euro to an Amazon of their choice.

So get creative. We look forward to seeing your work.