On November 11 at 5am eastern (GMT-5) as planned, we turned off everything Yarny to install some maintenance fixes. We’re continuing to work on some big time improvements, and until we release those, we’ll periodically inject fixes to eliminate known problems and annoyances. Overall, it took longer than we expected, which means we interrupted some of you from your normal writing schedule, but it was time well spent. Here’s what we did.
Some Yarny users were experiencing problems with line breaks not exporting properly. Now, they won’t experience those problems.
For now, Yarny needs an active internet connection to work reliably. Offline usage is one of those things we’re hard at work on, but it’s not quite ready. In the mean time, to ensure our users know when their connection goes down, or any other reason that their writing is not automatically saving, we’ll pop up a big warning. This will get your attention, but don’t worry. The best thing to do if you do see this is to copy the text from the current snippet to some text editor or word processor and then logout. Log back in when you have an internet connection and check the last snippet you were working on. If needed, copy and paste in any writing that was not saved.
Relatively harmless, but very annoying, is the bug we’ve come to call “snippet jump.” Some of you have experienced this when Yarny jumps to the first snippet even as you are typing on another snippet. Others are experiencing a jump to the first snippet when they click back to Yarny from another browser tab. Now that we have this one under control, snippet jump, as a technical term, may fade into oblivion.
We’ve also put in place some more technical stuff that’s quite boring to talk about and even worse to write about, so let’s just say it’s there to help prevent problems and handle them better if they happen. Of all the things we’ve addressed on this list, this is actually the most important to creating a peaceful writing environment for you. But, like I said, it’s just too boring to discuss further.
With SSL security in place, all of your writing will be encrypted as it flies back and forth between your computer and the cloud. We take great care to secure your data on our servers: this is another step we’re taking to protect your writing while in transit. We completed the first phase of getting SSL implemented during this outage, with the final cutover scheduled to occur soon.
As the writing tool of choice for thousands of NaNo competitors, being overly generous with word count is not a good thing. We tweaked our word count algorithm to more closely match the one used for NaNo. Speaking of word count, that same mildly generous word count algorithm, along with some egregiously wonky math, put our homepage word counter into the stratosphere. We are eating our humble pie this morning and dialing it back to a triple-checked recount. The actual number was just over 38 million words. Now, we’re really looking forward to our 100 million word celebration (again). Love, The Yarny Team
