Web 2.0 is the thing to be these days, and we’ve just made a major pre-Christmas upgrade to bring us closer to the 2.0 mark. Basically, 23 doesn’t do anything now that it didn’t do before, but a lot of ajaxing makes a lot of actions a lot smoother:

• Fotonotes: This is the addition that comes closest to actually being a new feature: Now you can annotate photos directly on the photos rather than by commenting on the photo. Apart from that the system works just like commenting does now; if you can comment on a user’s photo, you can “fotonote it”. (First examples from mariavibe and oschlag)
• Edit-as-you-go: Uploading multiple photos takes time, so why not use that extra time to organize your newly uploaded photos? Once the first file from a batch of files has been added to 23, you’ll be able to edit words, tags and privacy status without interfering with the overall upload. Automagically optimizing your time spent at 23!
• Tag auto-completion: 23 now suggests tags while you’re typing. For the moment the suggestions are based plainly on a search of all tags at 23. But expect the suggestions to improve soon…
• Photo page UI: This page has been ajaxed so everything happens smoothly and quickly within the page rather than through page reloads: Add and delete tags; add to or delete from album; add to favorites; editing words; and adding and deleting comments.

That’s all folks — now it’s in your hands: Start editing-as-you-go, organizing smoothly and fotonoting now!

Just wanted to let you know that the Conversations icon is on the toolbar — in case you hadn’t noticed. And there’s at least one new feature we never got around to blogging: You can tag other 23′ers photos and help keep the folksonomy alive. If other people tag your photos, your get an e-mail with the details and link to the photos.

Also, things haven’t really picked up for Noodlum Christmas Prize — there are only a few more days left to get your hands on that free plus subscription…

First thing’s first: Our server transition should be almost done. We’re still working out some minor stuff, but at least we’re in Amsterdam and proud of it! 23 should be running smoothly, and we’ll be adding more server power over the next few days to ensure that it’s kept that way. This also means that our zip features are back: that is zip upload and download (along with URL uploads).

We’ve also had a chance to move some of the new features from development to production. Mostly you’ll notice:

- You can now add photos to Favorites (or Favourites for the Englishmen?) and keep them handy for later use. It’s pretty simple: Just click the “Add photo to favorites” link and then browse all favs through the “Favorites” tab.

- We’ve had a Conversations feature in 23 for a long time now (three weeks?), as since our designer has gone missing, we didn’t have an icon for the toolbar. And we still don’t. But it’s still a new feature, and you’ll find it here.

- We’re still working on our own upload application for Windows, but luckily Kasper has taken this as a challenge and developed a simple .NET application for the purpose. Kasper has promised some more features and some interface smoothing, but for now, you can download the program and give it a go.

After our transition to the new servers in Amsterdam, the web server process seems to be dying every few minutes. We will try to resolve this issue, but if the service has not recovered within the next few hours we will transition back to the servers in Cologne.

Update: The service window has ended, but there are some stability problems right now. I’ll post an update here when they’re resolved.

The 23 service is undergoing a transition from our current servers in Cologne, Germany, to the new 23 data center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This is an announcement of a service window on Tuesday, December 6th, 2005.

For this reason 23 will be unavailable from 10:00 UTC.

The service window will last at least until 17:00 UTC. However, the service window may last longer. An extension of the service window will be announced here.

During the service window, 23 will be completely unavailable. However, photos uploaded by email should be queued for automatic processing after we are moved to Amsterdam.

In the event that the service window is postponed, an announcement will also be posted here.

Update: The service window has been postponed for one hour while we resolve a problem with the new database.

Update: The service window has been extended two hours.

Update: The service window has been extended another two hours. This will probably be the last extension.

Update: The service window has been extended another hour. Fingers crossed.

This post will contain information about our current migration to the new 23 data center in the Netherlands.

17:34 UTC Monday: We’re still in the process of copying data.

18:38 UTC Monday: I estimate that the copying process will take at least a couple more hours. If it’s done by midnight, I’ll announce downtime starting at 09:00 UTC on Tuesday.

18:46 UTC Monday: We’re currently pushing through 16 mbps between our Cologne and Amsterdam data centers. Earlier I measured 33 mbps. I love the Internet.

19:20 UTC Monday: You guys sure have a lot of photos! If we ever do this again, we’d probably have to move data the old-fashioned way.

22:00 UTC Monday: Copying won’t be done today. The copy job will continue through the night, and I’m announcing downtime starting at 09:00 UTC tomorrow.

22:13 UTC Monday: Here’s the service window annoucement.

06:02 UTC Tuesday: Copying is almost done. We’re on track to start the service window at 09:00 UTC.

08:45 UTC Tuesday: We’ve started the service window 15 minutes early to take advantage of the light traffic.

10:44 UTC Tuesday: I’ve started the final rsync run to ensure that the old and new systems have identical files.

13:14 UTC Tuesday: I had copied part of the data using scp without preserving permissions and modification dates, which meant that rsync was re-transferring those files. I’m now running my original copy job (with tar piped through ssh) on those files, around 18 GB, after which I’ll need to re-run rsync.

13:16 UTC Tuesday: People have asked in comments whether everything will be up, or whether it will take more time after the service window is ended. The answer is that everything should be back up by 16:00 UTC, but it’s always possible that I’ve made mistakes.

14:21 UTC Tuesday: The 18 GB I mentioned earlier have now been copied and I’ve started the rsync run.

15:09 UTC Tuesday: I just learned that chown doesn’t change ownership of symbolic links unless you pass the -h option, requiring a rsync restart and another hour. This is starting to get embarassing.

16:08 UTC Tuesday: The end is in sight. rsync is now transferring photos that were uploaded today.

16:15 UTC Tuesday: rsync is done. Now the rest depends on how fast I can type.

16:35 UTC Tuesday: The web server is set up again. I’m running a vacuum of the database. We should be up in a few minutes, apart from mail upload.

18:59 UTC Tuesday: The last problems with PostgreSQL 8.1 should be fixed now. The service is up again. It may be a bit slow for the next 12 hours because requests that hit the old IP address will be proxied to Amsterdam.

19:23 UTC Tuesday: The web server process is crashing every few minutes. Trying to work this out.

10:10 UTC Wednesday: The blog has been inaccessible for some people for at least 12 hours because I made a mistake in the DNS configuration. After the web server came up, the server process kept dying with a segmentation fault (”fatal signal 11″) every few minutes. I tried a number of things and will try to identify the precise cause of the error later, but it seems to be either an insufficient stack size or the version of tDOM that we are running. I changed the stack to 2 MB and upgraded to the CVS version of tDOM, and things seem to be running fine now. Zip downloads and url uploads will continue to be deactivated, probably for the rest of the week, until we get the second web server online.

14:26 UTC Thursday: We’ve had some serious performance issues since the transition. We isolated the cause to a maxthreads setting in AOLserver that was way to high. It’s been lowered to 35 (from 50) and things seem to be faster now. The second web server will probably be online this evening. This will improve performance while many users are uploading.