We made some upgrades to the server that hosts MyHomePoint last night, as well as some configuration changes that should have noticeably improved page load times and overall responsiveness of the site. That’s just the beginning — we’ll be making some additional changes over the next few weeks that should make the site even faster!
Did you notice any improvement (or any issues)? If so, let us hear about it!
Sorry for the short notice, but we are bringing the application down shortly for some maintenance that should improve performance and will help us to make further improvements going forward. Sorry for any inconvenience, and we will update this post once everything is back up and running.
UPDATE: As of about 11pm CDT everything should be back up and running as before. If you notice anything strange, please let us know.
Thanks,
MyHomePoint Team
The server that sends emails from our system had a hardware failure earlier this week. As such, you may receive a series of late emails that should have been sent out prior to today. We apologize for any inconvenience that you may have experienced due to not receiving your emails in a timely manner.
Due to the outage, we are extending the subscription of our paid and trial subscribers an extra month. You will find the credit on your Account page in MyHomePoint in the next couple of days.
We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused. We are taking steps to more pro-actively monitor the email processes. Please us know if you have any other questions.
OK, we admit it. The site has been stale for quite some time now. There hasn’t been much visible activity for some time now on either the public site or the actual application. In an effort to get some momentum to move forward, we decided that we needed to gut things and start with a new approach.
Our previous framework that we used for the public site (home page, features, about, forum, blog, etc.) was quite bulky and awkward to use. Not long after our last redesign, we found ourselves not caring too much for how it worked. We finally said ‘Enough!’ and have replaced the giant, multi-purpose website/blogging/forum framework, with several specialized solutions. While the integration may not be as seamless as we would like, the end-user experience and features for everyone (you and us) should be better. In addition, this allows us to offload some of the admin tasks associated with keeping all the pieces running.
The site has been redesigned from the ground up. Again, the previous framework made it really difficult to design the site the way we wanted, so we just put content out there and tried to make it look the best we could. Hopefully this new design is a little more friendly and has some marketing hooks that will result in a few more conversions.
We migrated all of our current posts to a new install of WordPress. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform out there right now. We have used it for several years now on our personal blogs and love the features and flexibility that it brings to the table. Hopefully with this in place, we can finally fulfill our promises of posting more often.
The previous framework had a nice forum implementation. We got a little bit of traffic on it, but not too much. Lately it has been really quiet. Unfortunately, a quiet forum is a bit like a empty parking lot when it comes to attracting visitors to your store, restaurant or site. We have seen several sites lately whose sole purpose is to provide the community infrastructure around improving your site. Sites that allow you to provide input, vote up features, submit bugs, etc. We settled on GetSatisfaction and are really looking forward to working with you there.
Hopefully we haven’t broken anything in the process of making the changes, but let us know in the comments if we did.
We pushed out some minor fixes tonight.
The process that sends emails from our system shut down over the weekend. As such, you may receive a series of late emails that should have been sent out prior to tonight. We apologize for any inconvenience that you may have experienced due to not receiving your emails in a timely manner.
Due to the outage, we are extending the subscription of our paid and trial subscribers an extra month. You will find the credit on your Account page in MyHomePoint.
We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused. We are taking steps to more pro-actively monitor the email processes. Please us know if you have any other questions.
This year, Daylight Saving Time is four weeks longer than last year due to passage of the Energy Policy Act in 2005, and will begin at 2am this Sunday evening. Until recently, MyHomePoint still saved calendar events using the old DST rules, meaning that without any changes, many events and reminders would be one hour off starting next week!
We have already taken measures to fix this, and everything should work correctly (i.e., you should not notice anything change at all). However, as with all changes like this, there’s always the possibility that something slipped through the cracks. If you notice that any events do not look correct beginning next week, please try updating the event as needed and see if that fixes the problem. If that doesn’t work, then please post in the forums or send an email directly to support@myhomepoint.com letting us know what issue you are seeing. Hopefully the government won’t decide to change things like this very often, as it makes our jobs a lot more challenging!
Things have been pretty quiet on our site lately. Partly because we are currently being pulled in many different directions and partly because we are trying to revamp the site in an effort to be a little more Web 2.0-ish. In an effort to let everyone know that we are still around, we are going to try to Keep the Posts Coming.
We will definitely try to include some tips and tricks about using MyHomePoint, but more often than not, we will be passing you on to helpful posts and articles that we have run across. While we would love to be able to write our own original content, for now, we will just settle for filtering relevant content that others are writing. We have a number of good articles that we want to pass along so check back soon. Once you start digging, it is amazing how much family and organization content that is out there.
We haven’t made any big new feature releases lately since our new import functionality, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not working hard! We finally decided that since the calendar is the hub of MyHomePoint, it is due for a little makeover. We are currently revamping our calendar interface to bring it to the next level of functionality and ease of use. We will be rolling out a beta version internally to some of our existing users for testing, but it won’t be long after that that we’ll release it to the public. Believe me, it will be worth the wait!
OK, so you can’t be online using MyHomePoint all the time — we understand that. [;)] Martha Stewart Living presents a wonderful idea for creating a custom chalkboard-based calendar painted directly on your wall. Four shades of chalkboard paint and a few hours of your time is all it takes for convenient offline scheduling. This tip would work great in a home office or even a kitchen with an open wall.
Check out the original article on the Martha Stewart website [via LifeHacker]
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