Breaking News

The site was down starting around 2pm Pacific time (9PM GMT) continuing until just now.

Unfortunately, it looks like those pretty, almost working, charts on the profile pages were the culprits. I've disabled them for now and will see what I can do to get them, or some other charting system, back in place ASAP.

We're switching to a new load balancer and adding an additional web server (which means disabling the archive sites for now) and we hope that this will help iron out our site performance issues.

Once that's in place, getting the Word Count Widgets and WCAPI back are the top priority, followed by the stats (both personal and regional), search, and 'posts by this user'.

--Russ Firebus

What a November 1 we just had!

I still can't quite believe it. This is completely geeky, but I have to share it. This is our site traffic from the past three days:

October 30: 54,00 visits
October 31: 98,000 visits
November 1: 139,000 visits

139,000 visits! That's 20,000 visits higher than the previous single-day NaNoWriMo record set on November 1, 2006. I want to thank our beautiful servers for not melting down once in the midst of that. As everyone who came by knows, the site was ridiculously slow and timed out and did other bad things as it struggled to keep up with the curious bystanders and all the super-authors updating word counts and checking out the new stats and graphs in the Author Profiles.

Today---the 2nd---will likely also be tough during North American daylight hours. But traffic drops daily from November 1 onward, and we're looking forward to re-adding the Author Search, the cut-and-paste automatic word-count updater, and a mess of other stats soon. We also have all sorts of display tweaks to make on the new charts on the Author Profile page and the widgets to get out. We'll do it!

Here's to everyone who netted 1667 words today!

Chris

Timezone by timezone, the noveling begins. Happy NaNoWriMo everyone! It's going to be an incredible month.

If you haven't already, be sure to read Russ' earlier Breaking News about the 15-minute forums cache he put on the site, and the great news about the site speed breakthrough. We're handing crazy amounts of traffic right now, and the site is holding up remarkably well. Hooray, Russ!

Russ is working on getting the stats pages up now. Also, the only way to update your word count at the moment is to head to Edit Profile--->Author Info and just type it in. We normally have a cut-and-paste word-counter and auto-updater there that you can use to get an official count, but Russ turned it off so the site would be as fast as possible for opening day.

The first pep talk (from Tom Robbins!) should be appearing in your inbox in the next 24 hours. And also coming very soon: An overhauled set of NaNoWriMo word-count widgets by the awesome programmer Paul Hawke. I'll post a Breaking News as soon as they're up.

Off to my midnight write-in,

Chris

Hi everyone.

Last night we added some caching to the forum and topic list pages. It's a 15 minute cache, which means that the topic count, post count, new topics indicator, etc. will only update once every 15 minutes. Likewise, if you bump a topic, it might take that long to show up as bumped.

Apparently I also broke the pager on topic lists. I'll fix that ASAP.

We also made some code and database changes that, along with the caching, has resulted in a major speed boost for the site.

It used to get horribly slow with around 800 authors logged in. Now it gets horribly slow with about 1500 authors logged in. Of course, now that we're in the lunch rush, we have about 1500 users logged in. Oh well :) We'll keep working on making things faster (and breaking things faster, and fixing things faster)

--Russ Firebus

In a matter of hours, folks in Australia and New Zealand will begin hurling themselves into the noveling fray, and the first word-count bars will begin appearing across the site. Soon, the noveling frenzy will envelope the world!

Bwa ha ha.

We just sent out an all-participant email with some thoughts about magic doors, mule-wrestling, and other important noveling matters. And I'm putting out a Class Five Site Slowness and Weird Database Behavior warning for the next couple days. Expect to see all-white screens, pages in places pages shouldn't be, strange log-out issues, and really, really, really long sign-in times.

This is what happens when the database stresses itself out trying to fulfill more queries than it can handle.

We hate it too. This will not happen next year.

If possible, try to update your word count on the site very early in the morning or very late at night. And if you're just reading the forums, doing so logged out (rather than signed in) will make everything go much faster.

Good luck, everyone! This is my favorite time of the year. Even after eight NaNoWriMos, it just doesn't get old.

Woo hoo!

Chris

Hey there! We had a fantastic time at the Pan-Bay kick-off party this weekend, and I've been getting reports from similarly awesome fiestas all around the world. I can't believe NaNoWriMo is almost here, almost here, almost here!

We'll be sending out the debut pep talk early this week. It's from the great Tom Robbins, and it makes me want to hug someone and then write a novel.

Russ has made improvements which now allow a few more logged-in users to play on the site at the same time. To help speed things up further, we're going to require that you select the forums you want to have visible on the Forums page starting Tuesday or Wednesday. I'll post explanations on how to do this (it'll be very easy) in the coming days.

Russ is trying to do everything he can to get the site as fit and healthy as possible before November 1, when the starting gun sounds and site traditionally has a heart attack and collapses under the load of 80,000 novelists updating our word counts. Go, Russ, go!

A new WrimoRadio will be going up today. We loved getting your 15-second submissions, and can't wait to hear what you come up with for the next audio challenge!

Chris

Wow! The good folks at LiveJournal, home to billions (well, thousands at least) of NaNoWriMo novelists, have put together a really nice celebration of NaNoWriMo on their site. They're even selling wee virtual ribbons during November, with 50% of the proceeds from them going to our Young Writers Program.

Thanks, LiveJournal! And hello to all you LJ users!

So it's with great pleasure that I start posting again about site slowness. Russ is continuing his nightly dances with the database to make it handle more logged-in authors at a satisfactory speed. He's fixed the bad code that made the site slow in the first week of the event. Now we're grappling with the end-of-the-month sign-up surges that quicken my pulse, give my life meaning, and make the site maneuver like a gouty rhinoceros.

My suggestion: If you just want to read the site and the forums (rather than update your profile or actually post in the forums), browse the site without logging in.

The difference in speed will make you giggle be noticeable on the non-forums part of the site. Maybe not so much in the forums. But Russ is working on it!

Also, can I just say THANK YOU to all the people who have been Goodsearching on our behalf this month? Good grief. 14,000 searches. You guys rock.

And don't forget about the kick-off parties this weekend!

Chris

NaNoWriMo kick-off parties are happening all around the world this week! Check your Regional Lounge for details. If you're anywhere near San Francisco this Saturday night, we hope you'll come raise a glass with us at Olive, where we'll be celebrating the imminent arrival of another month of creative mayhem.

The all-ages Pan-Bay NaNoWriMo kick-off party at Olive will run from 7pm to 10pm. And yes, we will make you wear oversized name tags with lots of things to fill out on them.

It's for your own good.

We hope to see you there (or at least see photos of you at a kick-off party in your town on our Flickr pool)!

Chris

So we have this NaNoWriMo blog that gets so sadly ignored in the off-season it's not even funny. And I look at blogs like BoingBoing.net that get updated four times a day and I just shake my head in wonder at their post-itude. But during the on-season, the NaNoWriMo blog actually sees some pretty serious action. Including the latest post about a scam email that's making the rounds from...me!

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

Chris

That reminder email I talked about in the last breaking news went out yesterday to a jaw-dropping 50,000 writers. That's the number of people who had signed up for NaNoWriMo last year, but hadn't logged in yet.

Today, they started logging in. Hooray, and welcome! We've added 6,000 authors to the participant list since Friday evening, and will likely see another 6,000 in the next couple days. Because of the surge from that reminder email, Monday is going to be one of the heaviest traffic days we've ever had on the site.

So the NaNoWriMo.org forecast: Site slowness Monday with scattered bizarre error screens ("low memory" anyone?), clearing late Tuesday as NaNo veterans get bored with filling out their new author profiles and wander back to novel preparations.

Also, I wanted to point out a couple new pages we have this year for those of you just arriving. Several of the companies who have donated to us in a hug-warranting way are making special discount offers to NaNo participants, which live over on the Special Offers page. AlphaSmart, one of the companies on the page, donated 25 more brand-new Neos to our lending library this year. We're loaning all 25 of them to an inner-city classroom in Chicago that wouldn't otherwise have been able to take part in NaNoWriMo. Thanks, AlphaSmart!

We've got featured videos from our Viddler group and our first NaNoWriMo Lifecaster over on the NaNoVideo page. And over on the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program site, Tavia and her YWP team have cooked up free novel-writing workbooks in PDF form for elementary, middle, and high school YWP participants. They're so much fun that adults have been quietly downloading them as well. Check 'em out!

Having caught a cold, and heading off to acquire the age-old remedy of tea and fried chicken,

Chris

ps: I'm in desperate need of a new novel. I just finished Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother. Anyone have a recommendation for something in a similar vein I should pick up from the library? Please send me a NaNoMail if so!