Chris Fullman is hosting a panel at SXSW on How to Be an Emergency Response Technician (ERT) and he's got some Lighthouse and Tender Support accounts to give away!

Tuesday, March 16th at 5pm in the Austin Convention Center room 7:

For many small businesses, the need for an IT person (aka “Emergency Response Technician” or “ERT”) often falls on one employee who primarily has non-IT responsibilities. This humorous presentation will offer valuable tips and philosophies to improve the productivity, prioritization and sanity of that often-overwhelmed individual.

http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/5233

Tender Support and Lighthouse will undergo server maintenance at 10 a.m. PST (-8 UTC) on Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010.

The services will be unreachable for approximately 2 hours. All incoming emails will be reprocessed once the systems have been brought back online. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Follow @tenderapp or @lighthouseapp on Twitter for live updates during the maintenance window.

Updates

2010-01-24 @ 12:45 PST
We're back up. All emails that came in during the maintenance window have been processed and everything on the systems look good. If you experience any issues, please let us know. Thank you for your patience.

We’ve recently deployed a few updates to Lighthouse:

• Ticket Previews
• Message Notifications
• Sortable Columns in the Ticket Listing

as well as some minor improvements. For more details, continue reading.

Last night we deployed a number of updates and tweaks to lighthouse which include the following:

• Tagging now includes autocompletion
• Milestone views now show closed tickets
• Pagination now added to tickets with a high number of comments
• Fixed attachment URL's in atom feeds
• Bulk Edits have a working link in the event feed

For more details, keep reading.

Earlier this week we deployed a hugely requested feature: ticket bulk editing.

Using that form, you can now update the state, milestone, assigned user, tags, and project for a group of tickets. The best part is that it’s applicable for just a few tickets selected with checkboxes, or the whole result of a query.

Try it out, and let us know what you think.

A weird thing happened recently. Several people got the urge to build iPhone apps for Lighthouse. Whatever it was that was in the air, we caught it too. And since we’re the people who actually make Lighthouse, we were able to do some back-end tweaks to make it turn out just right (in our ever-so-humble opinions, of course).

Presenting Lighthouse for iPhone.

Let's start off by saying that I woke up this morning with a case of the Mondays.

Our servers decided to hop on board that boat as well. Go figure.

At roughly 11:30 a.m. PST we deployed several updates to Lighthouse to address bugs in the system. Maybe it's bad karma or Murphy's law of some sort, but after the updates Lighthouse began to suffer from memory leaks which caused slow response times for the remainder of the afternoon.

Included in this update were the following bugs:

Previously on Lighthouse…

Max User limitation

If you hit your maximum user-count, the UI was attempting to place limitations on current users, so it was not allowing you to add them to additional projects. We nipped that one in the bud, so if you notice any permission issues, please let us know.

Create ticket button killed your new ticket

No one likes to lose information on a form. When you were in the process of writing up a new ticket, it was easily mistaken that the create a new ticket button in the sidebar next to the form would save your ticket. This was not the case! By clicking that button you were telling Lighthouse you wanted to create a new ticket. Fear no more! We've removed it form the UI in those cases, so no more losing your form data.

User-Badge dropdown

We received numerous reports from users where all of their projects were not listed on the User-Badge drop down. It turns out we had a bug in the code which indeed caused problems for a number of users. That's never fun, but it's fixed now.

So back to the memory issue...

Ok, so the remainder of the afternoon was a little bumpy. Lighthouse then began to start using up a lot more memory than normal, making the system extremely slow and giving a number of users intermittent errors across the system.

Around 4:30 p.m. we found the memory leak issue residing in a funky query and then deployed the fix immediately. The system has been running smooth as butter since then.

We sincerely apologize about the rocky hours of Lighthouse usage this afternoon and if you are experiencing any problems or noticing anything out of the norm to check http://lhstatus.com and then contact us at http://help.lighthouseapp.com.

I woke up this morning to some crazy database issues on Lighthouse. It’s hard to tell what’s going on after the fact, it already seemed like it was starting to settle down. I did some looking around, and noticed that there some projects that were deleted. Active projects tend to have a lot of dependent objects that need to be cleaned up, such as Events, Tickets, Messages, Comments. I just pushed a change that will offload this to a background job.

This particular issue was a bit difficult to track down, because the end result was that everything was slower. New Relic just showed the usual suspects at the top of the most active queries: Ticket.find, Spam.find, etc.

Things seem like they’re doing much better now, but I’ll be keeping a closer eye on thing and double checking that we have the proper database indexes in place.

I like to think that we have a pretty decent Lighthouse API. It doesn’t handle attachments yet (have you tried to upload multipart file content with ruby? yuck!), and a few other things, but it’s good enough to enable the creation of something like Lighthouse Keeper.

Jeremy and I were just discussing some ideas for a new Lighthouse client library (more on that later once it’s not so vaporous. Then Kyle chimes in:

Zing!

We just rolled out the first in a series of interface updates to Lighthouse that we're really excited about. This is something that has been in our playbook for quite some time, and with some awesome user feedback on our Lighthouse Tender, it is now becoming a reality.