Ohloh Announcements

Beginning Monday, December 7 and continuing through Wednesday, December 9, Ohloh will be operating in a read-only mode while we perform some major system upgrades.

During this time, you will be unable to log in to Ohloh. All project data and forum activity will be frozen throughout the maintenance period. Jabber integration and new software uploads will be unavailable.

Software downloads and general web site browsing will continue to function normally.

If you need technical assistance during this time, please send us email at info@ohloh.net. We may not be able to address your problems until the maintenance work is completed on Wednesday.

Thanks for your patience and your support. We are very excited about the upgrades to our system, and look forward to the improved service it will enable.

Thanks,

The Ohloh Team

Ohloh is migrating to a new datacenter over the next few weeks. During the migration, we expect some impact on the website:

• Project updates might be delayed.
• We might be slow when responding to support requests, e.g. questions about why a project report is delayed or different than what's expected.
• The website will be read-only near the end of the migration. We'll do this when we synchronize the information stored in our current Postgres database with the new datacenter. During this period, logins will be disallowed and the Ohloh API will be disabled. We hope to keep this portion of the migration to less than 2 days. Everything about the site that doesn't require login, browsing project information, developer contributions, etc., should be available during this period.

A major benefit to being purchased by SourceForge, now Geeknet, is access to a well-funded hardware budget and an experienced operations team. After the migration, Ohloh should be able to analyze more open source projects and update your projects more often.

Today SourceForge has acquired Ohloh. We at Ohloh are pretty awed and excited at the opportunity (and challenges) ahead. I plan on blogging more deeply over the next few weeks but I wanted to give you some background on why this makes sense.

Most developers know that SourceForge is primarily a 'forge' (duh!) - providing open source developers free tools and services to help them succeed. However, for many less-tech savvy people, SourceForge is actually thought of as an open source directory. As a result, SourceForge has found itself in the middle of a lot of software-related activity, from downloading to source code management (and almost everything in between).

The service we've built at Ohloh has focused primarily on making sense of these types of activity. This has allowed us to gain insight into broad trends going on in technology. We are able to detect what software platforms, languages and licenses are gaining ground - from a "production" (ie: development) side, as well as "consuming" (ie: users). As a result, we've built a service to help companies gain insight and build strategies based on these combined open source metrics.

So, tying it together, the goal of the acquisition is to leverage Ohloh's software development analytics to improve SourceForge's insights about the open source development community and help SourceForge provide more relevant advertising.

As you see, Ohloh's services will continue to improve and expand - and gain a lot more exposure by being part of the SourceForge brand. We've had a good opportunity to get to know the SourceForge team during the acquisition process and we're thrilled at the chance to work with them.

The good folks behind this website are in somewhat of a pickle. We need to get a J2EE expert (well, experienced person)'s professional advice.

Can you help? Get in touch w/ us:

1. IRC: irc.freenode.net in the #ohloh channel.
2. GTalk/Jabber: jasonallen@gmail.com
3. Mail: jason@ohloh.net

What do you get out of it? Hmm... beyond satisfaction for a job well done? Lemme think. Probably a few kudos, maybe a t-shirt... dunno yet. At the risk of repeating myself - definitely some beer whenever we meet ;-).

-jay

Our website suffered unplanned downtime from 1am to 10am this morning (PDT). The web growth we've seen lately came back to haunt us: our servers drew too much power and caused a circuit breaker to blow. We've reconfigured our power circuits to address this appropriately.

Hardware failure aside, the real embarrassment for Ohloh is how long it took for us to respond - it was unacceptable. While our site is currently monitored, none of us caught the alerts at 1am. The SMS/emails didn't wake us up (as they have in the past). We clearly need a better system.

My first step is to find a better web monitoring service - hopefully with one that has some type of escalation procedure. Ideally I'd like a service that starts by sending email/SMS but then escalates to calling alternative phone numbers until someone responds. I'd welcome any suggestions below (or at jason@ohloh.net if you prefer).

Our sincerest apologies. The beer's on us next time we meet.

-jay