Downtime Resolved And Source Discovered

Alrighty, let’s get this whole “downtime” issue out of our vocabulary now. That was a very long and unnecessary stretch and we’re very sorry for the inconvenience.  We received scads of phone calls, emails, and tweets regarding the service being down and thankfully (kudos to all of you!), we weren’t scared off by the comments.

Again, you are why we do this.

So, thank you for being so nice when we’ve struggled.

Here’s why we went down:

• It started with some crazy database crashes, which we fixed quickly by increasing the number of connections allowed to the database.
• After quite a few more times of needing to restart the database service and apache… and scratching of our heads… we finally figured out that the reason the database was continually crashing was that we had run out of space on our hard drive.  That crashed the database, did nutty things to the tables, and more.
• So, we added some notifications and enabled some restrictions so that we get alerts now when we get close to capacity.  The nice thing is the table in question is just a data repository – not needed for operating anything – so we just backed it up for posterity, emptied the table, and voila, we’re under capacity and everything’s back to normal.

What we did find out in the process was that we hit 26 million queries.  That’s just crazy.  With this kind of service, having to do this type of maintenance every 1-2 months is doable, but not really on my top list of things I want to do on a Saturday.

Thus, we’ve come to this… we’re considering how to monetize this service so that we can pay for either moving into the cloud or increasing our service at our outstanding host.

If you have any ideas – things you’re willing and wanting to pay for – we’re all ears.  Paying for the service, even in small chunks for the biggest users, would be a huge step up for stability.  “All for one, and one for all.”  We’re for you.

Bring your thoughts … we want to hear them.

Unexpected Downtime

So, as many of you have probably noticed, we had some unexpected downtime in the past 2 days.  We’ve since fixed the issue permanently and shouldn’t see this kind of problem again in the future.

Thank you all for your patience.

New JSONP (JavaScript Callback) Support

I really love great suggestions. A few days ago David Evans from CanTab sent me an email suggesting an additional feature be added to Tiny Geo-Coder. He was kind enough to send along an example of what the new API call might look like and what the response might look like. It was so simple, I couldn’t resist.

This evening, I implemented JSONP support into the Tiny Geo-Coder API (JSONP in Wikipedia). So, now, as the documentation explains, if you send a querystring variable titled “callback” with the value being whatever function name you’re wanting to use, you’ll receive it back, wrapping the geo coordinates (or location, if you’re doing reverse geo-coding) in your function.

David explains the use case for this best:

The beauty of this is that it allows you to use the API in AJAX apps without running into problems with the same-origin policy.

So, there you have it. Go run off and create some awesome AJAX apps and report back to me what you’re doing so I can give you some props here on the blog.

Cheers,

Nate Ritter

13 Million API Queries Later …

As you may know, I created this nice little service back in March of 2008 but didn’t release it publicly until around November 2008 because I didn’t think it was that valuable. Boy was I wrong. Apparently it’s been valuable over 13 million times to many of you who are reading this today since early December ’08.

That’s freaking amazing. I honestly still laugh at the simplicity of the app and think it’s hilarious that people are even using it. But, at the same time, I fully understand how much it’s needed now.

In case you didn’t get that, it’s been about 6 months and we’ve had 13 million queries on our API (if you can even call it that). That translates to about 3,000 queries per hour or 50 queries per minute. I’m actually amazed we haven’t gone down more often or run into the infamous “620″ error more. I mean, I know it’s simple, but still. I’ve never personally created anything (by myself) that’s gotten this much use before.

Regardless of how that gets me all up in an excited tizzy, the real thanks goes out to you! Thank you for using the service. Thank all of you who have given feedback and suggestions. Thank you for linking to this site, writing stories about it, blogging about it, and spreading the word. Thank you for thinking it’s useful and using it. You deserve 13 million thank you notes.. but don’t worry, I won’t spam you with that.

Please, as always, let me know what I can do to help you with your app. Also, please don’t be shy in letting me know what you’re doing with it. I would love to start highlighting people’s projects and companies who are using the service. I’d love to share the “thank you” with some link love and press for ya.

Thanks again! Keep on geocoding!

Nate Ritter, Web Chef

A Mere 3 Hours Later… Tada!

A mere 3 hours ago I posted the first blog article for Tiny Geocoder about the imminent redesign. Well, all I have to say now is… Tada!

Big thanks go out to the folks at Woo Themes for their awesome WordPress theme magic. I just ripped the theme into static HTML using Site Sucker, did some customizations of my own and voila, here we are.

As far as I can tell, everything works just fine. I didn’t touch the API, so that shouldn’t have changed one bit. But if you see any problems with the design, don’t hesitate to let me know.

Cheers!

New Design Coming Soon

First, welcome to the blog

Before we get down to business, I just wanted to take a second to thank you for dropping by. The Tiny Geocoder service has been functional since May of 2008. After a great chat with and some convincing by the folks at my local NPR station, I decided to publicly release it in August of 2008. Since then it’s hit some pretty big press like Lifehacker and others. It’s been a great ride and I’ve had the fortunate(!) problem on multiple occasions where our servers got slammed with so many queries that it couldn’t handle it.

Unfortunately, that still happens every now and then even to this day because we need about $1000/mo to keep from hitting our limits. We don’t have that kind of money, so we do what we can with what we have.

In the meantime, I’m happy to have been helpful to so many services (see a few of them in the sidebar to the right). The app serves an average around 120k – 200k API hits per day and will probably continue doing so without a hitch.

New Design Coming Soon

Now that the service is almost 6 months old I’ve been prodded to make a modification to the design of the site. Well, not really a modification… more like an overhaul. Luckily this little site doesn’t have much code to it, so it’ll be pretty simple. But, I’m excited to get down to it and make it easier to use and understand.

The incentive behind the design is to get highlighted on Single Function. Whoever it is that runs that great little service over there had some great suggestions regarding a site redesign… I like suggestions, so I’m going to do it before we get listed on their site.

A note about this blog

I don’t really believe I’ll be updating this blog too often, but I do expect when I do it will be the place I will announce feature/service changes, known outages, and other Tiny Geocoder news. I’ll also probably add a few feature posts here and there about the apps and people who use Tiny Geocoder as well as geocoding in general.

As always, if you have any suggestions, I’m happy to listen and most likely implement. I enjoy providing the service and people have generally been super nice, so I’d love to hear more of what you’re looking for from a simple service like this. Speak up and you will be heard.

Thanks again… happy geocoding!