Just a short note because most of you will (hopefully) not notice anything different. If you use both 43 Things and 43 Places, you have been logging in to both with your 43 Things account. We’re splitting them apart, so now you have separate 43 Things and 43 Places accounts. All existing users have had their usernames and passwords copied over, so you have the same urls, same usernames, and same passwords as before.
If you’re having trouble logging in, I apologize for any bugs, and please contact us so we can get things sorted out.
If you’re curious about our reasons for doing this, it’s mostly to reduce confusion (with things like logging in with facebook, closing accounts, etc) as we develop the two sites in different directions. If you haven’t had a look at 43 Places in a while, go take a look.
Happy almost-Spring! Just a heads up that our web host is doing some scheduled maintenance on Saturday night, from 10:00PM to 2:00AM Sunday morning (Pacific Time). We’re told that the maintenance won’t include downtime, but you know how these things go.
It’s almost 43 days after New Year’s, and we hope you’ve got your New Year’s Resolutions squared away. We just took the Resolutions feature off the home page, but you can always access your 2010 Resolutions with the tab on your profile page:
Or you can go directly to your 2010 Resolutions if you know your username, e.g. http://www.43things.com/people/resolutions/joe
From that page, you can copy individual Resolutions over to your Life List with the click of a button!
While we were at it, we did an update to the homepage, which should make it easier to add new goals and create a new account. New users can play around with the site, adopting goals which are temporarily saved until they create a 43 Things account. We also cleaned up the log in and sign up pages.
Check it out: http://www.43things.com
As always, please let us know if you see bugs, slownesses, or any other ghosts in the machine.
Thanks, from the Robots
How’s your 2010 going so far? We hope you’re sticking to your New Years Resolutions!
Sunday morning starting at 2:00am Pacific time, we’re bringing all the sites down for database maintenance. The outage may last up to 4 hours, but probably won’t take that long. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, and we hope we picked a time that will impact as few people as possible.
update: maintenance completed without any problems. The sites were down for about 2.5 hours. Thanks for your patience (especially those further East from us who had to go without 43 Things in the middle of their days!)
[Photo by andrewscott]
We’ve made some recent hardware changes in our ongoing efforts to speed up the sites and keep things more stable. We just finished commissioning 7 new boxes in our fleet, 
with a net increase of 2 servers.
We are now running on a total of 9 web servers with of 16GB of RAM per box.
New hardware is not all it takes to keep 43things.com running fast and stable, but it is part of the solution, and some of the hardware we replaced was 4 years old. We’ll update you on some of the network and software changes we are also making to deal with the increased usage of the site. Thanks for putting up with some of the site’s setbacks. We feel lucky to have a problem like too much content and too many heavy users – that is the sort of problem we never want to get rid of.
If you’re still seeing the “Scheduled Maintenance” page, try refreshing your browser a couple times. Thanks for your patience.
Ivan is tuning the database to improve performance. We should be back up in less than an hour.
update: began maintenance at 10:10am PST (expect to be back up at 11:10am PST)
latest update: sites are coming back up now — it’s 11:15am PST (65 minutes total)
If you’re still seeing the “Scheduled Maintenance” page, try refreshing your browser a couple times. That’ll normally do the trick.
