Experiencing heavy traffic

Hi guys,

We’ve been having intermittent downtime this week. This is due to a significantly higher than expected volume during midterms season.

What basically happens is, everyone tries to use EasyBib at once during peak hours and the concurrent usage can overwhelm us.

We are working around the clock to deploy a more robust setup. In the meantime, we suggest you use the site during off hours - before 9pm EST or after midnight EST.

Thanks for your patience.

Darshan

Columbus Day site updates

Hi all,

Happy Columbus Day! Hopefully you are resting on this school holiday, but if you have to work, maybe the updates below will help (though we’d guess you’d prefer the day off…):

• Internet Explorer Parenthetical Citation Wizard fixes: If you’re a MyBib Pro user, you may have found that the wizard did not work for you all the time. We’ve fixed this issue.
• Exporting your bibliography to Word: We’ve made the option more prominent (click Export to Word when you’re viewing your bibliography) and we’ve also made a separate landing page so you can retrieve your RTF manually if you need to.
• Speed improvements by way of PHP opcode caching: Last week we hit some pretty severe traffic - among other smaller adjustments, we’ve added a cache to make our servers work more efficiently under higher loads. It’s called APC.

Debate watching

Hey everyone,

As election season nears we’ve been asked a few times how students can cite the presidential and vice-presidential debates.  Using the TV citation form, it’s simple. Here’s an example:

2008 Presidential Debate. CNN. New York. 26 Sept. 2008.

Personally, I’ve always found the weeks leading up to an election exciting. The twists and turns this race has taken have been no different. Here are some links I like to check out:

• C-SPAN debate center
• Electoral-vote.com
• Miss a debate? You can find it on Hulu

And of course, for everyone out there that’s of voting age: regardless of your politics, it’s important you participate. Be a good citizen and register to vote - click here to learn more.

Downtime resolved: 8pm-midnight on 10/6/08

Hi all, If you tried using our site last night, you may have experienced intermittent downtime. We had significant concurrent traffic on our system that ended up locking up some of our front-end servers.

We’ve resolved the immediate issue, but are taking steps to prevent this from affecting us long term:

• Two additional front end servers to be deployed this week
• Additional RAM upgrades across front-ends
• Exploration into cloud-computing solutions to handle traffic spillover

Again, apologies for any issues you may have experienced and know that we are working our hardest to keep downtime at a minimum.

Citation tweaks, speed improvements, & more

We deployed some updates to EasyBib today - here’s a brief summary:

Citation source updates: We’ve added the “vinyl recording” type to the musical recording citation form (thanks Emily!), and the Book of Proverbs to the Bible form (why that was missing the first time around we have no idea - thanks Timothy and Daniel for pointing this out).

Interface updates: A lot of people have been asking if they can export their citations to Word. Even though we’ve had that option since we launched, it was slightly buried. We’ve moved the links around a bit so it should be easier to find (thanks Tom, for this and all of your other great suggestions).

Bib4School tutorials: For our new Bib4School subscribers, we’ve added a number of tutorials to the administrator control panel that help walk you through the process for creating teacher and student accounts.

MyBib signup reminders: When you sign up to a MyBib account, we’ll email your login and password information so you don’t forget.

Speed improvements: We’ve optimized our database, and that’s made our pages load a lot faster. We hope you notice the difference.

Google Chrome on EasyBib

Hey bibbers,

Not sure if you’ve heard, but Google released a new web browser today they are calling “Chrome.” We’re big fans of Google at EasyBib - we use the Google Apps suite of tools for all of our internal business needs, we use Google search (obviously), and so on - so Chrome was something we were excited to check out.

Let me first get my personal opinions out - Chrome is a fast install, has a non-intrusive interface, and works speedily. Most of the sites I use load a lot faster in Chrome.  It’s a beta product, so there are some small issues (for instance, javascript rich text editors, like the one in Tumblr, don’t work properly).

On that basis alone, I’d encourage anyone who is interested to at least check it out. I’m a FireFox user, but I’m likely going to switch to this. Internet Explorer users, Chrome is worlds ahead of what you’re used to.

So why am I writing this post? Well, new browsers always have implications for Web developers, especially new browsers launched by a company with Google’s reach.

The biggest concern is interface stability: Web browsers can interpret a site’s code differently, which could have far reaching implications for how a Web site looks. For instance - we spent a lot of time making sure our site looked the same in IE and Firefox, but there are minor issues that are still not perfect. Adding another browser in the mix could complicate matters.

Fortunately, Chrome uses Webkit, which Apple’s Safari is also based on, and our pages render well.  So that’s one concern neutralized.

The thing that I was most interested in, however, was something new Chrome is bringing to the table. This is the Chrome Task Manager, which is basically a way for users to tell with Web sites are hogging all their memory. We’ve all been in situations where our browsers freeze and crash, and we don’t know why. Well, Task Manager is a way of figuring out which Web sites are naughty and which are nice.

So how does EasyBib perform?

Here’s the screenshot - When I first load the EasyBib site, it loads about 11MB of memory, but then goes down to about 7MB. As I use the site, it hovers around 10MB. I’ve included some other sites for comparison.

Overall, I think 7-10MB is pretty decent. Fellow web developers, what do you think? For your own sites, were you happy with your memory performance? Any suggestions to lower the usage number? Post your thoughts in the comments.

New citation format: Blogs & Podcasts

A common question we receive on our help desk is, “How do I cite a blog?”  Blogs are increasingly becoming a mainstream source, and students are often finding the information they need for their papers in this relatively new type of source.

To help, we created the blog format. You can cite a full blog article, a blog comment, and even interviews and product reviews.

Blogs are information sources that you should treat with some care.  There are thousands of blogs that are written by professionals and experts, but there are thousands more that may not be. Obviously blogs are becoming a very important medium for information transfer, so to categorically deny this source as a respectable citation medium would be the wrong thing to do. Just take pains to double check the quality of what you’re citing.

And let’s be honest: this applies to all sources you use. Always confirm the quality of your materials when you do your research.

EasyBib featured on CNET Webware

Easy as ABC: Web Apps for Students

“This one is a little bit of an old school pick, but it’s an indispensable resource for every student.”

Thanks guys!