If you are an existing customer, you will need to re-enter your credit card details – unfortunately, our credit card merchant can’t migrate your card numbers from one system to the other. You will get charged the full rate again, but we’ll credit you back the pro-rata value (This is a manual process, so it might take a couple of days to sort it out). If you have any problems during the process, flick us an email from the contact form.

The other advantage of this upgrade, if that you are are now able to download proper invoices from the system directly now (Which will no doubt make the tax man happier). Again, this doesn’t go back in time, so you will only be able to get invoices for after you update your credit card details – if you want previous ones, we can generate them manually for you (Again, shoot us an email).

That’s it for now – we have some big plans over the next couple of months, so stay tuned!

Happy time tracking!

We also have a twitter account, which will have smaller announcements posted to it, so make sure you follow us.

We would love any feedback you might have – leave us a comment, or send us an @ reply on twitter.

We are quite excited about this upgrade, and it has been a long time in the making, so we would love to hear your feedback on Monday!

It doesn’t look like this will affect too many people, as IE 6 is less than 3% of our traffic, but if you are still using it, we would recommend upgrading your browser.

More details of the new roll out shortly. Oh, and if you want to try out the new version before it goes live, send us an email!

If you are still having problems – Drop us a line!

Whilst I’ll be periodically checking that 88 Miles, I won’t be checking email very regularly during that time, so by all means, continue sending any email, just don’t be offended if you don’t get a response until early 2009!

So have a safe holiday season, and I look forward to tracking your time in 2009!

At the server level, 88 Miles is now running Passenger (aka mod_rails) instead of Mongrel, which better utilises memory and doesn’t require the overhead of proxing. It’s also a lot more reliable and stable (especially when it comes to restarting or pushing out new versions). Although I must admit, this mornings downtime was more to do with some overzealous settings than anything else — I think we are at a sweet spot now, so I don’t think I’ll need to touch it again for a while.

Much of the code for the core functionality was written quite a while a go, and was in dire need for a clean up. There was a lot of unnecessary iteration and object instantiation that resulted in really long load times for the main page (as well as for punching in and punching out). By pushing more of the work to the database and utilising the fact that a DB is better at searching for things than my code is, I managed a 4x speed increase.

However, that wasn’t quite enough! By adding some database indexed to regularly used foreign keys, I managed to bump that speed increase to nearly 10x! And this is just the start — the priority at the moment is the speed and stability of the system.

Hopefully you will notice the speed increase — there is, of course, things out of my control, such as network latency and server load — however on the whole, you should be getting a much snappier 88 Miles experience.

The speed up also applies to the “View recent shift summary” function too.

I’m lucky enough to be presenting a talk at Web directions in Sydney at the end of September. If you are lucky enough to be going to WDS08, please drop me a line!

There are some pretty cool apps on the list, including big players like Atlassian and of course our good friends Saasu.com, Scouta and Norg Media.

Rounding up the Perth list we have The broth, Minit, Buzka, Gooruze.

Congratulations to everyone who made the list!

An online version of the list can be seen here.