Development Blog

Welcome back

Summer’s over, and that can only mean one thing, kids: it’s time to start doing your homework your teachers are posting on Essign!

Performance of the Web application has been rock-solid since we switched to a new hosting provider in early May. This ensures that you will always get your assigned homework, rain or shine! Don’t think we didn’t hear that collective groan, students.

Here’s to a productive school year.

Essign has a new home

Well, it turned out to be much easier to fix the random errors than we originally thought. This is good news for us, but even better news for you guys.

Essign is now on a faster, more reliable server. You should notice that the pages load much more quickly, and you shouldn’t have any of the recent problems.

Naturally, we have to add the disclaimer that this switch was made very quickly, and there might be some things we overlooked. If you find a new problem that wasn’t there before, please drop us a line using the support link at the bottom of the page you were on.

An update on recent problems

So, Essign has been a little spotty lately. Sometimes when you log on, you won’t get any errors at all, and sometimes almost every click throws an ugly message your way.

Think of it like a friend who immediately responds to your voicemail on some occasions, but at other times can leave you hanging with nothing to do on a Friday night.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a problem that can be fixed immediately; it’s going to take some time. We really appreciate your patience with the buggy program for now. When you get an error, the best you can do is to refresh the page and hope it loads the next time.

This kind of service is unacceptable and we’re working hard to fix it.

Oops

So we had a little glitch this morning, April 1st – no joke! Service is still a little spotty… we’re working on it. Service should be back to normal. If any teachers put in new assignments early this morning, the assignments might be missing now. You’re going to have to put them in again; sorry!

Sorry if anyone got caught up in this mess.

"They're just these features, you know?"

We’ve got a few new things to roll out today. First off, check out that fancy new page header block. In it, you’ll find the current page title, along with any relevant links and pretty icons to boot. From now on, common page actions and navigation will be located here.

Here’s a fun one for teachers. If you are using the “student questions” feature, now you can choose to have these questions instantly sent to your e-mail inbox. Log in and go to Account Settings to double-check your e-mail address and to enable this feature. We promise you will like it.

Attachment errors?

Recently, we’ve been seeing a lot of error messages in the log files that pertain to attachment files being missing, yet nobody has reported any problems. We have been unsuccessful in recreating this scenario, and would be grateful if anyone who has encountered this error would send in a Support message with details about how it occured. Thanks a bunch.

Irony

It looks like the Support and Feedback forms were both broken! Go figure. Anyway, they’re all fixed now.

You’ll also notice some new fancy icons on the welcome page. These beauties are courtesy of Mark James. We’re going to try to work these into the interface in more places to add a little color and make things easier to find.

Edit: I guess many other things were also not working, such as creating new assignments. These should be okay now. Sorry for that (rather large) inconvenience.

Hic-hic-hiccups

Thanks, everyone, for bearing with us during the recent application issues. Our hosting company just updated some software that Essign needs to run, causing some minor things to break here and there.

We think we fixed everything, but if you find a newly-broken page, please let us know ASAP using the support form.

Server Issues (Resolved)

I’ve been told the site has been down since yesterday. There seems to be a problem with the server on which this site is hosted. Our Web host knows the problem exists and is working on it now.

Sit tight, folks!

Update: “Outage resolved: We believe the issue to be resolved. […] We’re very sorry for any inconveniences.”

Ahh, Refreshing

We performed a little refresh of the user interface today. Everything should be in the same place as you found it before, but you will notice a few tweaks here and there that help clean up the site.

Most notably, the page header has changed and opened up a little. Along the left side at the very top, you will find application-related links: your school’s home page, the teacher list, and search. Along the right-hand side of the navigation bar will be links relative to your identity. Teachers will see a link to their control panel, students will see a link to My Homework, and so on.

We also obliterated those confining, useless border lines along the left and right of the page. We found that the page content holds itself together quite nicely without the need for a containing border.

Users on Internet Explorer 6, all 14% of you, probably noticed that the old site had some issues with the page footer and such. All that is fixed now.

As with any improvement, there will be problems. Please be sure to report any problems you see in this new interface.