News

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

German services down

Due to hardware issues at some of our servers, some of our German services are currently offline. Our system administrators are doing their best to get the machines up and running again as fast as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this is causing.
 
Monday, September 3, 2007

What a Sunday....

Yesterday, around 7 p.m. EDT on Sunday, we started having some problems with our database servers. For some reason, we had log files growing enormously within minutes, clogging our hard drives. Once our monitoring team discovered those issues they quickly jumped onto the boxes, yet it took some time to resolve those issues (what a bad coincidence - we had some networking problems during that time as well....). Once resolved, we had to power up all our services, including 21publish.com and 21classes.com. In the end, we were down for more than 6 hours.

We apologize for this inconvenience, and we're still investigating what exactly caused those problems. I'm sorry you couldn't access our services during that time, but I assure you we're doing our best this won't happen again.

 
Monday, August 13, 2007

21Classes stops advertising on its free classroom portals

We would like to present some new features for our classroom blogging service.

Most importantly, we have decided to offer our free accounts without advertising. After observing your feedback, it became obvious that advertising in a school environment can be very misleading for students.

Other new improvements of the new release include features such as full text search and tag clouds. They can easily be turned on by you for your classroom portals and allow for better content retrieval by your students. These options are available to all paying customers.

We hope we could meet your requests and we keep on improving our service to your needs. As usual your feedback is greatly appreciated. And if you like what you see, please help us spread the word and write a short blog entry about it.

Happy blogging!
 
Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Enhanced support of special characters

We have just introduced support for pretty much any kind of character to be entered within comments, texts, links etc. Until now, only the text editor supported entering special characters such as é or ä or Chinese letters, while the remaining system only supported the so-called Latin1 or ISO-8859-1 character set. Now, we have switched to Unicode, so all characters are now encoded using the UTF-8 enconding. This encoding allows most characters used throughout the world to be entered anywhere within the system (I'm not saying "all" because I'm pretty sure someone can come up with some still unsupported characters... ;-) ).

So our Chinese or Japanese bloggers should be able to convert their templates very much into their mother tongue, and Spanish, French etc users should now be able to post messages containing any kinds of accents without further problems.

Should you encounter any problems, just let me know.

 
Friday, June 22, 2007

RSS feeds now include user images

We have improved our RSS feeds: if you have a weblog image for your account, this image is now included in your RSS feed. This feature is supported within RSS 2.0, which is the revision we are providing for your blogs. Once you publish a new entry, your RSS feed will be regenerated containing the user image - provided you have one, of course.

Have a great weekend everyone!!!