NewsCloud, a Seattle based Knight Foundation grant project, is working to pull newspapers out of the stone age and get them into the social media game. The application provides news organizations with a way to integrate their content directly into a customized Facebook application, helping them reach new audiences.

Earlier this week, the NewsCloud crew mentioned their use of both Lighthouse and Tender Support in their blog post, Development, Outreach and Financial Tools We Use - Managing Your Grant Project Series.

We'll be performing server upgrades to Lighthouse tonight at 8:00 p.m. PDT (UTC/GMT -8 hours). Lighthouse will be offline during the maintenance window is expected to take approximately 1 hour.

You can follow our Twitter account HERE for live updates.

Update:

9:02 p.m. - We just brought Lighthouse back online. So far so good. User avatars are currently broken.

9:12 p.m. - Working to get Avatars back up as soon as possible. It's no fun when nobody has a face.

9:43 p.m. - Known issue with attachment uploads hitting errors. We issued a quick fix. Large file uploads may time out from time to time until we have a permanent fix in place.

We’ve schedule an emergency maintenance window at 4 p.m. PDT (UTC/GMT -7 hours) to account for the slow response times users have been experiencing.

Maintenance is expected to take 30 minutes, with 5-10 minutes of downtime while we upgrade the current hardware and restart the servers. We apologize for the short notice and any inconvenience this may cause.

Updates:

Friday @ 4:17 p.m. PDT

We've pushed the maintenance window back to Saturday.

Sat @ 9:18 p.m. PDT Servers have been rebooted and are back online.

Over the last few weeks, we've received a large amount of user feedback regarding slow response times across our servers. Lighthouse users in particular have been experiencing intermittent delays that result it long load times, often resulting in errors.

The spikes on the database appeared to be random, but over time, a pattern unfolded. We've grown a lot over the last few months, and it's starting to take it's toll on the servers, affecting the stability of the applications and the users experience.

We sincerely apologize about the issues. Our products are just as critical to us as they are to our users and we're currently working with our host to implement a fix and secure stability to the servers.

That's right! We're moving to the Cloud

We've mumbled it in support discussions recently, but now that the reality is upon us, we're proud to announce that we're moving both Lighthouse and Tender Support to the Engine Yard Cloud.

Last month, we diverted a large portion of our attention towards preparing for the move. The good news is that we're almost there. Over the next few days, we'll start migrating key portions of the applications, followed by the applications themselves.

The most exciting part is the scalability and large performance gains. The core setup of our cloud infrastructure is a lot more hardware than we're currently running on. It feels like I'm trading in my Volkswagen for a Porsche.

We'll post more details about the move soon.

ENTP has some new exciting positions opening up. We're a small company of 10 employees located in Portland, Oregon. If you're an experienced web application developer or someone looking to gain experience working in a mature team environment, continue reading and check out the positions we have available.

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.