First up – my sincere apologies for the inconvenience that edublogs.org performance issues must have caused a lot of people these past couple of days.
Secondly, an explanation – basically we’ve been conducting a massive move of Edublogs to the premier US hosting company, Peer1, who host (among other sites) youtube, wordpress.com and other large web companies… they’re the best that you can get.
While this went well at first, there has since been a configuration issue with the cluster that we’ve been working on night and day to fix up and which Peer1 are now dedicating an entire team to assist with.
Of course, this is no excuse, just an explanation, but please be assured that all blogs, uploads, settings and alike are completely secure and that we’re working our absolute hardest to get this resolved and fixed up for you as soon as is humanly possible.
Why are we doing this move?
Well, we’ve got a selection of amazing new features and tools to allow you to manage student blogs and classes which are pretty much ready for deployment. But in order to make sure that we can provide these to you without it killing the system, and to support current (and any extended) growth… there are almost a quarter of a million edublogs now – this had to happen.
Of course, it should have happened without this disruption, and for that we honestly can’t apologize or thank you for your patience enough.
James
I’m a college professor and we’re right in the middle of our term. Although it sounds as though access has been up and down, this is now the fifth day that I can’t access it–almost a week. Can you give me a reason I shouldn’t migrate to Blogger? I like the wordpress design and platform, the forums, and the educational community, but reliability is everything.
Thanks for the update … and a sneak idea of what the new features will be. I feel bad for those that haven’t had access to their blogs for several days, especially those using them for projects or presentation. I can understand that, as I will be presenting edublogs next week at an international conference. But is it isn’t up, I have plenty else to talk about, that is the neat part of Web technology … lots of variety. Good luck with migration issues .. and I am especially looking forward to the new goodies that have been dangling in front of our noses like a motivating carrot.
Hi Evelyn and Franck, the new features will allow you to connect with other edubloggers in an entirely new way and also simply manage entire classes via edublogs, with a minimum of fuss.
They’re going to be amazing – and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your patience while we get this right.
Well, I can’t wait for everything to go ahead. My students and I just started using Edublogs and we’re loving it! The community is very supportive and it is the first thing they ask about when they come to class. I’m going to be using my blog to help gather some survey data for an upcoming podcast I want to do with my class. Its a great service. My class and I are anxiously waiting for everything to be up and running. Keep up the great work!
Thanks Mr. Winik, we promise we’ll make it worth your while!
I am so disappointed that edublogs is not reliable right smack dab in the middle of our term. Edublogs should have taken server upgrades and academic calendars into consideration when deciding on an appropriate upgrade timeline. I’ve got 6 educational blogs going, none of which have been functional or accessible for a week. Edublogs is – or soon to be “was” – my sole means of communicating with students about my educational programs. I can’t rely on a server that isn’t itself reliable.
We too have been pretty frustrated. It’s sort of ruined the “teachable moment” in a lot of ways. But I suppose it is what it is, and I’ve had those kind of projects that just seem to snowball and go poorly myself. We’ve been considering jumping ship, exported back over to wordpress.com, but will try and be patient a few more days. Hopefully Edublogs will recover, but this has certainly pushed me into looking at alternatives including some self hosting.
And with that said, I see its down… Again…
We’re working on it again now, apologies again.
Thanks for the explanation. Good luck getting everything up and running again. My students and I really appreciate your service. And now it has become unavailable for a few days, I think we realize just how important a part of our course it has become.
Can you please give me the assurance that this is going to be fixed by next week?
James, as always there are a few ungrateful souls out there complaining that their freebies aren’t available at their convenience. I like to think that I’m one of the more longer term users of edublogs and the amount of time when edublogs has been unavailable is really minimal over the three years I’ve been using this fantastic service to the education community. As Frank said, there are many places on the web to be using and this is still the premier place to be blogging – bar none.
My apologies if I seem ungrateful. As all educators know preparedness is the key. I am merely trying to determine if I need a backup plan for next week….again many apologies to James and rest of the folks at edublogs. Have a great Day!
Keep your chin up, James. I know you are as frustrated (or more so) as any Edublogger. Amazing how we got along just fine without blogs for centuries, now we can’t seem to live without them for a week! :) Looking forward to seeing the things to come!
James: Is there a target date that you can share with us? Edublogs is a crucial part of our students’ educational experiences and this is prime time for the academic year. As much as I am grateful for edublogs’ services, as an educator I am up against a wall and must find quick solutions if my students can’t gain access to my programs’ websites. I rely 100% on edublogs and right now… I’m up a creek.
Hi Guys,
Without a doubt we will have this fixed up one way or another within a week, with luck it’ll me 24-48 hours.
Again, can;t tell you how sorry I am, we’ll get there.
@Graham Wegner: I don’t think its a matter of being ungrateful. Sure, this is a free service. And THANKS to Edublogs for that. There are lots of free services though, and many of us have chosen to invest our energies here in Edublogs in part because we feel our missions coincide.
This isn’t a one way street, we are *invested.* As disciples of Web2.0, often bringing new teachers and students to the table, OUR reputations are hinged on recommending services that work reliably time and time again. I can’t afford to stand up in front of dozens of educators, only to have services not work, or not work as soon as these folks go back to try it themselves. They will simply just give up.
Instead of starting with a blank slate, I will then have to dig out of a hole repeatedly apologizing for things outside of my control and convincing them to try again – probably elsewhere.
And with students it is even worse. I can not use the tool to ask students to complete their assignments NOW, and the teachable moment is often VERY fleeting. As an adult, I get an idea while driving in my car, and if I don’t blog it right away, I will often lose it. For kids, if the service isn’t up, the inspiration is gone. Moreover when a child writes something, and weeks go by without comment, they don’t go “oh well – I just wrote that for myself anyway.” They indeed take it to heart. (Try not grading papers for a month, or throwing them away in front of the students.)
Consider the good Samaritan who suddenly decides to practice medicine on your child. Why can’t you share your antibiotics? We require a certain standard of care before you hang out your shingle.
Would you send your children to a school where the teachers may or may not come today? Would you continue to wait on a bus that shows up only part of the time? How about the roofer that shows up with staples and school paste to shingle your home? Do you shrug your shoulders when the road to your home is closed today for unannounced construction? Do you feel that because you get your email from Yahoo or Google that it doesn’t matter that the email you have been expecting show up because you haven’t paid extra for it?
Probably not. Certainly after 3 years your level of “TRUST” is much higher with Edublogs. That’s great. Most of us look at it perhaps a little different -> I just need to know when this will be up and working and reliable again.
Accidents happen. The road gets closed. I don’t want to beat up @James & crew, and I feel quite bad that their goodwill isn’t panning out. When YouTube moved to Peer1 there were terrible service disruptions until things got settled. Some of this may have been forseeable and perhaps, as one other person stated, could have been timed a bit better.
Before I further ask professionals and young minds to TRUST *ME* and come to Edublogs, I need to know that I’m not misplacing my trust. It has 0% to do with “being ungrateful.”
And that is perhaps my main point here. I have no problem with you being fanboy and defending @James. In fact – I’m glad to see you do it as a satisfied “customer” with three years under your belt. I do however have a problem with you painting a picture of others who are obviously concerned for the very real implications on their own networks of followers as “ungrateful.”
For over a week now these folks have been removed from the grid, silenced, dropped from “the conversation” of what makes them tick. With 30 or so weeks in a school year, that is a significant amount of time to just sit and shrug your shoulders. Your comment undermines @James very real apologies for understanding how important Edublogs is in this process. Fortunately, you don’t actually speak for Edublogs.
You only need to follow the discussion on Twitter, Plurk, or any other social network to understand how disruptive this has been – WORLDWIDE. (A quarter million educational blogs have been hosted here?) Or, you could read the comments here. People are frustrated, and their concerns are generally saying this same thing:
Edublogs is important to us. When can we trust it again?
I teach web design at a high school. I have 60 high school students (each designing their own page.)
Is there anyway to download WordPress locally and work on their edublogs pages offline, and later upload what they have done?
Because it’s a public high school level, we already have numerous technological problems, adding this has been extremely frustrating. Please don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the service.
Guys, I massively appreciate everything that you are saying, with luck we have just figured out what the issues are finally and things should be fine from here on it. We’ll post more shortly.
@Dan. While I would not wish to undermine anything James is doing, and he can tell me to shut my mouth anytime he likes – fanboy or otherwise, you seem to be reacting somewhat sensitively to my observations. Believe me, I read the comments before mine and they are indeed varied in their reactions but from where I sit, phrases like “Can you give me a reason I shouldn’t migrate to Blogger?” or “Edublogs should have taken server upgrades and academic calendars into consideration when deciding on an appropriate upgrade timeline.” do sound ungrateful to me. Luckily for you, I don’t speak for edublogs but consider this, where else can you lay your concerns/complaints/issues right at the CEO’s feet?
For me, it is a planning issue.
When several planned class activities fail, the teacher loses credibility. Regaining that with a class can be difficult, especially in the first 6 weeks of school.
Could an re-estimated uptime be posted on Sunday? Thank you.
Hello everyone, just wanted an update on whether service has been restored. Main page was up and running and was able to get onto other people’s edublogs but not my own. Anything new happening?
Hiya,
http://mrwiniks.edublogs.org/ is working just fine for me.
Have you tried either cache clearing techniques:
http://edublogs.org/forums/topic.php?id=6866#post-19048
http://edublogs.org/forums/topic.php?id=5517&page=2#post-12526
It seems to be working great! Thanks for the quick response!
Is anyone else suddenly having problems accessing their blogs? It’s been working fine all day, but as of about 2:45 pm central I was unable to access…..let me know if it’s just me.
It’s 8:00 pm Eastern Time and it’s down again. Anyone else?
I’ve been having difficulties as well. I can’t access my blog or even edublogs main page. Its 6:30 Mountain Time and I lost access around 3:30 PM Mountain time.