ziizoo blog

A new, fine-tuned version of the tag selection tool is now available. It should provide more relevant groupings and better suggestions during tutor profile creation. More importantly, it makes much deeper searches possible, with more context and smarter related tags. The upgrade should not affect your existing tags. You can try it out by visiting the tutor tab and tweaking your services. As always, report any issues or suggestions using the ‘report a problem’ link at the bottom of any page.

We experienced some unscheduled downtime early this morning from about 6:30AM to 10:30AM CST after a sharp spike in traffic that came during a routine server backup. Everything is back up and running now and full diagnostics have been performed, but let me know if you have any issues.

As the site enters a new phase and the community continues to grow, we’d like to hear from our early adopters on which new features they consider most important.

Of course, bugs in current features will be addressed first, but your feedback will help to finalize the development schedule once that’s complete.

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if you’ve uploaded a new profile image since the beta launch you may have noticed that the image dimensions were distorted. This problem should be resolved now but let me know if you have any issues.

you may have noticed when you search that the option to re-sort the results has been removed. since the search backend is completely revamped we’re also having to re-write the sorting code. since the new search is based on overall relevance — text matches, availability, feedback, etc. — tutors who are online or who have positive feedback will automatically be listed at or near the top of the search results. that said, we still want to provide a way to explicitly sort the results, so look for the sorting options to be available again by early next week at the latest. you’ll be able to sort results, ascending or descending, by:

-relevance (default)
-availability
-feedback rating
-price

if you’d like to suggest additional sorting options just forward them to me or leave a comment here. i’ll also be posting the relevant details of the search algorithm we use so you’ll have a better idea of what you can do to boost your search ranking.

so i’m just getting back to monitoring the server. i noticed some issues with the presence feature — the application server lost its connection with the XMPP server, so presence was not being updated properly. as part of the refactoring process i’ll be modifying this component to automatically detect dropped connections so manual restarts won’t be required in the future.

i restarted and everything seems to be back to normal. let me know if you see any issues.

“When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.” –Henry David Thoreau

for the last several months since the alpha launch, the dog running at me has been the beta release of ziizoo.com. in the end, it wasn’t my whistling that saved me. it was my lack of fear of dogs.

i’m not disagreeing with thoreau or suggesting you not try whistling if a dog is running you down. i’m just saying that sometimes the dog just wants to play and there’s no reason to be scared. now if the dog doesn’t want to play and the whistling doesn’t work, things get complicated, but that’s another post.

the important thing is that the beta release of ziizoo.com so far seems to be a smart dog who learns tricks easily and doesn’t chew up shoes.

everything went smoothly with the deployment on saturday… the site was down for less than half an hour while i did the update. other changes were made on the fly with no additional downtime.

i’ll be posting details on the technology behind ziizoo.com in the next several days — Speex-encoded Jingle VOIP over XMPP, Google Search Appliance and the ziizoo algorithm, Resin Quercus and Java/PHP bliss, and so on. if you aren’t intimidated by a few acronyms you can check back and follow along to see how it all came together and where it’s all going.

if you’ve played with launching tutorial sessions from the site you’ve probably noticed it’s not quite perfect yet. we’re actively working to remedy the issues you’ve encountered so far, so when you see the ’site is down for maintenance’ message, chances are we’re putting up our latest changes.

as things stabilize on the tech side we’ll be making major improvements and adding some very cool new features to make online teaching (and learning) a highly intuitive, streamlined experience, so keep the feedback coming and help us make the most of this alpha phase!