The Inside Track

For this birthday we’re happy to announce a brand new version of Trixie Tracker coming at the end of next month. This new version has been in development for over a year and we’re insanely excited to be on the home stretch. Really. We are extremely ready to put this baby in your hands! I first announced the new version this time last year, and while our original release target has slipped, I’m very pleased with what we’ve accomplished and I am confident you guys are going to like it.

Why did our development schedule slip so badly? The short answer is software development estimation is hard. The long answer is the existing application had to be completely rewritten from the ground up because it was too difficult to work around five year’s worth (counting the beta development time) of calcified code and there was more in the application than we realized.

We look forward to rolling out the new version next month. If you are interested in helping kick the tires of the new site, please follow us on Twitter; we’ll put out a call for beta-testers soon.

Thanks to all our great parents who’ve supported us over the last four years and made this new version possible. Thank you!

Ben MacNeill
Founder, Trixie Tracker

I want to point out (in case you didn’t know) that Trixie Tracker is designed so you don’t have to track continuously. For example, if you aren’t concerned with the weekend schedule or are taking a vacation, you can just stop tracking. Start tracking again when you’re ready — TT will automatically exclude all the empty days from your averages.

Daylight Savings Time transitions will cause problems with the display of your charts, but it doesn’t affect your actual data. Here’s a few notes to help you through the weekend:

• Trixie Tracker will handle the time change automatically. You don’t need to do anything.
• Your charts will be off until Monday. There’s no way to map 23 hours or 25 hours to a 24-hour time scale. It’s like trying to park an 11-foot car in a 10-foot garage — it’s just not possible.

Falling Back

In the fall, it’s extremely difficult to tell software which 1:50 am you are talking about when there are two times that exactly match that description. To avoid this problem, please record events in real-time during the transition hour (and avoid editing them afterwards).

Springing Forward

In the spring, the transition is easier. Recording real time events shouldn’t be affected because we skipping ahead, and the times never overlap.

We just got done moving to the new server. It took 1 hour 50 minutes from start to finish. (We didn’t start until a little after 2am EDT). If you notice anything weird, please email me (info@trixietracker.com) and we’ll look into it right away. Thanks again for your patience while the site was unavailable.

We are currently planning to upgrade to our new server tonight at approximately 1:45am EST (Friday April 11th). The site will unavailable for about 2 hours while this move is taking place. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks in advance for your patience. Everything should be back to normal by 4:00am EST. You can check our twitter account for status updates: http://twitter.com/trixietracker.

We just deployed the latest Trixie Tracker code which brings big improvements to our site back-end and coding environment. At this time, most users should not notice any real changes to their sites. But the new code allows us to work faster and easier, so you will start noticing visible changes and improvements soon. If anything isn’t working right for you, please email info@trixietracker.com and we’ll get on it asap. thanks for using TT!

From a user’s perspective, I know there haven’t been many signs of Trixie Tracker development lately, but we have actually been grinding away behind the scenes. We’ve been working on a big, back-end code clean-up that’s going to make it faster and easier for us to work on fun front-end things like design and features.

We’re planning to move the new code out Saturday night if all the testing goes well today. I’ll post a notice to the site when it’s time.

Please note, this is not really a feature upgrade. I’ve tweaked a few things that will be visible to users, but 99% of the changes are only apparent on the back-end.

I have also created a Twitter account to provide real-time updates about Trixie Tracker service status: http://twitter.com/trixietracker
If you ‘tweet’, please follow us. If you don’t tweet, you can subscribe to the updates with the RSS feed or simply visit our twitter page for information.

We are also moving to a new, faster server next week. I don’t have the exact date set, but I will post a notice when it happens. There will be some downtime with the code upgrades and server move, but I hope it won’t be more than 30-90 minutes. I will give as much notice as I can, and post updates through twitter.

Thanks in advance for your patience when we upgrade, and especially thanks to everyone for supporting Trixie Tracker!