We had about a three hour service interruption this afternoon which we would like to apologize for.
All systems are up and running now at full speed.
Next week we’ll be updating our database server setup to gain more performance and reliability in the future.

23 has undergone something of an overhaul over the past month or so. It might not be visible on the surface, but we’ve been performance tuning extensively for the past month or so by rewriting key features to consume less resources (Just In, Subscriptions, Conversations, Calendar to name a few). A few days ago we put a new version of 23 online, which serves almost every photos on the page differently from previous versions to ensure less load on the servers.

However, the problems have not been caused by poor coding, and have not been solved by writing better code. We’ve simply hit the ceiling of our current hardware configuration. We’re awaiting delivery of our new database server, so please have patience with us for another week or so.

To keep the eager 23 users occupied until then, we have added a few new features as well:

Calendar
The calendar view has been rewritten and is now written in JavaScript only. This means that you can browse the calendar smoothly and easily. We’ve also added an “All month” view after a user request. This view allows you to get an overview of all photos uploaded to 23 by year.

Bloggable slideshows
If you’ve ever wanted to include a slideshow from 23 on your web page or blog, this one is for you. You can simply get a code snippet for an album, a tag or for all your photos. This is an example with all photos on 23 tagged “23″: