EasyBib on Amazon's Cloud

We’ve made some changes that we are proud to report. If you were up early this morning you would have noticed that we were down for a few hours of “scheduled maintenance” from 6:30AM to 9AM Eastern.

During that time period, we switched our servers from where they are located (here in NYC) to Amazon’s Web Services cloud. If you’re familiar with that term, you’ll know that there are a significant number of Web startups and services moving in that direction.

If you’re unfamiliar with what I’m referring to, Amazon Web Services is a “cloud computing platform” by Amazon (yes, the books company) that allows Web sites to easily adjust their server infrastructure to meet the needs of their Web traffic.

That means as more people use EasyBib, we can add more servers to keep things speedy. We’ve cut down a process that used to take days: ordering a server, getting it shipped, then installing it - to a few minutes: clicking a button to launch a new server.

There are additional benefits like better data backup, cheaper access to storage, and more, which we like too. We’ll discuss that more in a future post.

Anyway, this is our first day in the Amazon cloud. While things certainly will not always be smooth (Amazon has had it’s fair share of downtime), right now we’re pretty thrilled. If you experience any hiccups let us know.

Shoutouts: CouchDB (thanks Jan for all the debugging/erlang-rewriting help), Rightscale (for the countless support back-and-forth emails), Amazon (for existing and continually innovating), and of course, thanks to all of you bibbers out there, the fuel of our fire.

New updates

Hi everyone,

You may have noticed, but we’ve deployed a couple of minor changes across the site.

New help fields: We’ve placed a help caption next to every field on EasyBib’s citation forms. This way, if you’re confused on any particular source field, you’ll be able to learn more about that item in the help section. The help fields used to be placed at the bottom of our page, but we’ve received a lot of feedback and decided to update the positioning.

New APA 6th Edition reference guides: If you’re a teacher or librarian and like our reference guides, take a look at our newly updated versions!

Best,

The EasyBib Team

Database recovery process

Everyone,

We experienced a database crash tonight.

We do have backups, and are working to restore citations.

You can continue making citations, the new ones will be saved.

It will take us several days to restore old citations, but they will be back.

We will continue to update you with our progress.

Update (1:19AM 9/18/2009):

We should be able to restore access to citations this weekend. However, we may not be able to recover the last two weeks’ worth of data. We are looking into this now.

Update (12:51PM 9/18/09):

The recovery process is underway. Citations made before August 31st, 2009 will be recovered over the next few days. Our database backup is monthly, so we cannot recover any citations made after 8/31/2009.

We apologize profusely for all of you who have been saving your theses, dissertations, and other bibliographies on our site. We value your patronage of our site, and thank you for your patience in this process. If you are a MyBib Pro user and we just messed up your assignment, please contact us for a refund.

Again, the backup process takes a few days to fully re-populate our database. Data should be restored by early next week.

Update (9:49AM 9/19/09):

Some people have been asking whether there were any security compromises. The answer is emphatically no. This was specifically a hardware related failure.

The database importation for citations prior to 9/1/09 is continuing on schedule.

Update (10:14AM 9/21/09): Recovery process completed.

The database recovery process has completed. As stated earlier, we were able to recover citations until 9/1/2009. If you have any questions about this process, please contact us.

New features for the new school year!

Hey bibbers,

Here’s the latest update.

• APA 6th Edition: Updated to support the latest style guidelines from the APA 6th edition guide. If you’re a MyBib Pro user, you automatically have access. If you’re not a subscriber and need APA for your classes, check out our free trial. Updates include:
  
  • Addition of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI), which now take the place of online publication information where available.
  • Streamlined Web site and database publication
  • Contributor formatting changes (now we show eight contributors, or an ellipse if more).
  • Other changes across the board to sources and forms.
• Faster page loading: We’ve updated our code to make the pages load faster. We hope it makes your EasyBib experience even smoother!
• Minor fixes to Chicago style & footnote formatting.
• If you’re a school, take a look at our School Edition product - we updated our pricing over the summer to make it even more affordable for schools.

Cheers all!

The EasyBib Team

Bibbin' just got better: Better pricing for schools!

Hi everyone,

We’ve released some summertime updates:

Easier institutional subscriptions: we now provide a free trial for schools that want to use our institutional product, now called School Edition. If you’re a teacher or librarian, please take a look at the exciting features we offer at very affordable prices.

Knowledge base: We’ve completely revamped our help section. You can now easily find any bibliographical or account related information you’re looking for. Not only that, but it’s completely searchable so you can find what you need.

Multivolume works: We’ve made it possible to now cite sources that are multi-volume works. It was one of our most requested additions!

New subscription options for MyBib Pro: Now, if you just need a month or 6 months of access (if you’re in summer school for example, or just need EasyBib for a semester), you can sign up to be billed in those periods. Of course, you can still sign up for our annual subscription.

The 7th edition of MLA is now our default format. If you still need MLA 6th edition, just click the MLA6 button (it’s still free!).

Lastly, we’ve created a publication placeholder toggle. One of the more confusing rules in the newest MLA format is the addition of publication placeholders (n.p. for no publisher, n.d. for no date). We now let you choose whether to add or remove these placeholders. We wanted to provide the most flexibility for users that also maintains our accuracy and ease of use. By default, we do not show placeholders (which is the consensus we’ve received from feedback from educators.)

Many more exciting developments are in the works for the start of the school year.

Take care bibbers,

The EasyBib Team

The easiest site on the Web? Google thinks so!

According to Google, when people think of “easy” they’re looking for EasyBib!

If you go to http://www.google.com and start typing “easybib,” by the time you finish typing “easy” you will see us pop up to the top of their auto-suggestion list!

(According to some readers, it helps if you’re in the US, and possibly logged out of your Google account). In any case, thanks Google!

Bibbin' just got better: MLA7 and public sharing!

Hey bibbers,

Over the last month we’ve gotten a number of requests to support the latest edition of MLA. Well, we’re happy to announce that EasyBib now supports the 7th edition of MLA, free for all users!

To format your list in MLA7, just click the “MLA 7” button at the top of your list.

By default, your lists will continue to be cited in MLA6 unless you click this button. We’re supporting both formats because there are still some schools making the transition and may be confused by the new style. We’ll switch to MLA7 by default over the summer.

Also, for you Twitter / Facebook fans. You can now share your bibliography with your friends by clicking the share link located at the bottom of your list. We’ll give you a short URL that you can quickly paste into your Twitter or Facebook profile. Your friends & colleagues will be able to see your citations, save them to their own list, or even email & print them out.

We’ve also included a wide assortment of bugfixes, including our Parenthetical Citation Wizard for MyBib Pro users, and some backend changes that should make the sites run faster and more efficiently. Again, thanks for using EasyBib - your support & continued usage of our service keeps us in business =)

You rock, Sharon!

At EasyBib, we’re always happy to help you out with all your bibliography needs! And every so often, there are fans who help us out! We love it!

Check out the following presentation done by Sharon Elin! Thanks so much! :-)