Domain expired -- temporary downtime

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I have renewed the Running-Log.com domain name. The site should be working again within about 24 hours.

Update: That didn't take long at all. The site is up and running again.

Fixing the site downtime issue

Every 4-6 weeks, I get an email or a tweet that lets me know that Running-Log.com is down. I've known the root of the problem for a while and was usually careful in not letting it happen. That's failed me the last two times, though, so it was time to finally automate the fix.

The site is allowed 5GB of disk space on the server. If that gets full, then bad things happen. In particular, the database shuts itself down and refuses to start again. Every time that someone visits the site, some things get noted in some log files and these files grow over time. Eventually, they fill up the available disk space and the site goes down.

The solution to this is log rotation. Instead of keeping one log file, you keep one log file per day. You keep a week's worth of logs and delete the oldest one each night. Once this is setup, you've only got a week's worth of logs at all times, which will generally be about a constant size. The size of the log files will no longer balloon and take up all the disk space.

I had tried setting up log rotation previously but it wasn't working. This morning I investigated why it was failing and remedied the issue. I'm happy to report that it's working now, so the site shouldn't go down periodically anymore.

Website Downtime

As some of you probably noticed, the site was recently down for roughly 24 hours. This had also happened in early January. The good news is that the root cause of the issue has been identified and, I believe, fixed.

As always, if you see that the site is down or having any issues please use the contact form or email feedback@running-log.com.

Update: It appears I didn't actually get to the root cause of the issue. Figuring this out is one of my highest priorities right now.

Update 2: With some help from the fine folks at Joyent, I think I've got this tracked down. Time will tell, but if there are more issues it will be my #1 responsibility.

Release Notes - Running-Log.com: v1.2

This release really focuses on the team functionality. If you have any ideas for future improvements or see any issues with the updates, please let us know.

423: Teams | Roster: Implement the basic roster page

The team roster has moved to its own page and is much cleaner, sticking to our design philosophy of simplicity.

424: Teams | Roster: Implement management features

Team administrators (coaches) can now manage their roster much easier. All roster management is done directly on the roster page. You can bulk approve pending join requests and bulk delete members who've left the team. The experience is very intuitive.

444: Teams | Team Overview Page: Implement the Team Overview Page

The team overview page has been completely redesigned. It keeps the popular "recent workouts" and adds a similar "recent forum posts". It also has a "featured member" that changes each day. You can easily get to all the other team pages directly from the overview page.

431: Teams | Workouts: Implement the workouts page

There's a new team page that shows you all of the workouts of all the team's athletes. You can filter and search the workouts, just like your personal workouts page.

427: Teams | Forum: Make thread page prettier

When viewing a thread in the team forums, you'll see an updated layout. Names are now linked to the athlete's log and post times are shown in your local time zone rather than the "3 hours ago" format.

408: Month Calendar: workouts in last week but next month get counted in totals

On the monthly calendar page, workouts in the next month were being included in the monthly totals if they were in the same week that the month ended. This resulted in inaccurate monthly totals.

410: "Remember me" doesn't work on production server

The option to remember your login is back, so that you don't have to enter your password every day when you come to the site to log your workouts.

392: Update browser history when searching workouts

When searching your workouts, the browser history now gets updated properly. You can now go back and forward through your searches.

441: Nav Menu: Sort teams by name

The navigation menu previously showed your teams in a random order. They're now sorted by name.

430: Workouts: Doesn't show duration

The main workouts page now shows duration in addition to distance.

Produced by FogBugz

Minor release: two small changes

I just updated the site with two small changes.

1.) When you view a workout, your pace is shown again. I'm not sure why that got dropped, but it's back now.

2.) Emails are working again. The site wasn't able to send email, which would block things like creating a new account, resetting your password, and sending feedback.

Significant performance improvements

After the most recent update, it was pretty clear that some pages on the site were running really slowly. The biggest offenders were the calendar, workouts, and statistics pages. Tonight I started looking into it and found a very simple solution. I was just missing a database index.

Page	Before	After	% Faster
Statistics	15468 ms	242 ms	6392%
Calendar	6896 ms	117 ms	5894%
View Workout	791 ms	23 ms	1265%
Workouts	2196 ms	247 ms	889%
View Team	2782 ms	319 ms	872%

ms = millisecond

The site is ridiculously faster now. Enjoy.

Release Notes - Running-Log.com: v1.1

210: Add statistics page

There's now a statistics page. This page lets you see your distances and durations over a variety of time periods. Find it under the My Log menu.

293: Add searching capabilities to the workouts page

You can now search your workouts! You can filter by exercise type or interval type, or do a textual search of the titles & descriptions.

204: Shoes: Initial mileage

Shoes can now have "unlogged miles". This is particularly helpful when joining the site. You can estimate the number of miles on your shoes and they'll be added to the total.

319: Cache the navigation menu on a per-user basis

Added some caching of the menu bar to improve performance a bit.

47: Add a "remember me" option on login

Tired of entering your email address and password every time you visit the site? Now just click the "Remember me" checkbox and you won't have to. Be sure to only use this option on private computers.

EDIT: This isn't working. I've taken away the checkbox on the site. Look for it to come back in a future update.

271: Show pending team requests and allow user to cancel

The main teams page now shows any pending team requests that you've made and allows you to cancel them.

280: Week and year calendars don't highlight current day

The week and year calendars will now highlight the current day and month, respectively, similar to how the month calendar works.

400: Public logs: show links to other pages under heading

When viewing a public log, there are navigation links to go between the calendar, statistics, and workouts pages.

317: duration totals were dropped in v1.0

The calendars show duration totals again in the summaries.

273: Show times when distance isn't entered

The monthly and yearly calendars show durations again for individual workouts and months, respectively.

288: Yearly calendar doesn't show "other" workout type

There was a bug preventing the "Other" exercise type from appearing various places, including the yearly calendar.

340: Public RSS feeds aren't publically accessible

Public RSS feeds are working again.

341: Distances should round to the hundreth instead of to the tenth

Common quarter mile distances were being displayed as either .2 or .3 instead of .25.

326: Team roster should be alphabetized by last name instead of first

Updated the sorting of the team roster page to make it easier to find names.

Produced by FogBugz