After a few days of wrangling, data-importing, and pulling our hair out, we’ve got BetterOmaha.com back up and running (mostly). Everything related to the news is working (search, imports, etc). The Restaurants section still has some corrupt data, which will will be correcting later today. Additionally, we’re missing news imports from the last few days, so those will slowly be added today as well.

All in all, we had nearly two days of downtime, for which we sincerely appologize. As a beta product, we’re still working through some of the technical details regarding our hosting. We thought we had it a little more figured out than we did. Sorry.

Some of the root causes we know, and some of them are still unclear. We will be performing some forensics on the incident, and will provide a full writeup here, likely later this week.

Thanks for your patience and continued support…

The BetterOmaha Team

The BetterOmaha.com site is currently experiencing issues. We are aware of the problem, and are working hard to fix the problem, and get the site back up and running. We will keep you posted with status updates here, and will also provide a full explaination once we know more.

Thanks for your support and understanding.

UPDATE - 4:40pm CST - Now redirecting all traffic going to betteromaha.com, to this blog. We are unable to get the original ec2 instance rebooted, and are currently in the process of rebuilding a new image. Stay tuned.

UPDATE - 6:10pm CST - We have the new instance up and running, and we’re currently in the process of getting the 15gig BetterOmaha.com database restored.. It will take a while. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE - 10/5/08 2:30pm CST - Yes, still down. The database restore tasks provided by EC2onRails are timing out on our size of database. We’ve tried several times to get them to run. We’re now resorting to a manual reload of the database from the latest backups. Should have something soon.

UPDATE - 10/6/08 2:00am CST - Unable to get the server restart issue resolved. It appears to be a rather nasty issue with Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu 8.04, specifically AMI’s that are generated off of http://alestic.com scripts (as ours are). We are currently in the process of merely getting the server up, and we will worry about the fact that the server can’t be rebooted, sometime in the future.

Over the weekend, we rolled out a number of bug fixes and enhancements, most relating to the news feature of the BetterOmaha site. In no particular order, here’s a listing…

• RSS feeds for news now include abstracts, images, and a link to the original article
• Beta page does a better job of “remembering” if you’ve logged in
• Leaving a comment or a review will now correctly expire the cache, so they will show up immediately under “Recent Activity”
• Across the site, we now only show “published” articles, meaning the results no longer include things like AP articles, and other non-Omaha articles.
• “Clustered” articles only show up once in the feeds and in the section pages
• Fixed the Gastronomic Fight Club source to correctly strip HTML. We will be publishing articles from that source starting today.
• The “weather icons” correctly take into account the changing of the seasons, so that it no longer shows a picture of the sun, when its dark outside.
• Other misc fixes and tweaks….

If you see any other anomolies with the news data, please let us know! Over the next few weeks, we will continue to roll out enhancements and fixes for not only that data, but the restaurant data as well.

Thanks for your continued support… Stay tuned, there are great things ahead!

One of the things that we pride ourselves in on the BetterOmaha site, is our attention to the little details. One such silly example of this, is the fact that our weather icons correctly represent the current moon phase.

Though this is pretty dumb, it’s important to note that its not *intrusive* at all for the end-user. It in no way detracts from the end-user’s experience. If we thought that it would get in the way of using the actual site, we’d nix it for sure.

Quite on the contrary, we think its a fun little touch that hopefully you look at and are like “WOW, they went to *that* much trouble.. hahaha.”

Today we focused on a couple of major bugs, one of which was the RSS feeds. The feeds themselves are now a bit more valid, and are accessible even though the site is locked down with “beta”.

One of the main goals of BetterOmaha is to provide “RSS Feeds for Everything”. A couple of examples of the RSS feeds available from the BetterOmaha site:

• Articles written by Stephanie Monge (using search… feeds for authors don’t exist… yet)
• All articles in Sports
• All articles tagged with “Dining Notes”
• All articles from The Reader
• And many more!

We feel that the RSS features of the site are truly some of the most valuable advantages that the BetterOmaha site has to offer. We hope you enjoy these enhancements… Play around a bit with the RSS feeds, and let us know if you experience any problems!

This weekend we made a number of enhancements to the site to try to improve overall stability and performance. Previously, you may have noticed that we were having issues with stale data. This was largely a caching issue, where the cache was not being properly flushed.

We’ve now started to implemement an improved caching strategy, as well as vastly improved index coverage in the database to speed things up when there’s a cache miss.

We’re still working on these improvements, but wanted everyone to be aware of them. In the meantime, there’s likely to be a few issues with data, pockets of slowness, etc. Additionally, we had to disable the “lead article” feature of the main page. For a number of reasons, it was computationally intensive to generate, and thus until we can figure out a better way to handle it, we’ve temporarily disabled it.

Stay tuned here to the Better Omaha blog for further developments!

While in our beta period, its especially important that we gather as much feedback from actual users as possible. What do you like about the site? What do you *not* like about the site? What ideas do you have about directions we could take the site? What *problems* are you having using the site? Etc etc etc…

These are the types of information that can truly help us make this a world-class application, that people actually *enjoy* using. Because of this, we have made it even easier to send feedback…

Merely click the “Send Feedback” icon in the upper right, and type your comments into the box! We will address each one, and update you here on the blog when their updated!

Cheers, and thanks for using Better Omaha!

As some of you begin to click through the site, one of the things you might first notice, is that the data that we’re presenting is a bit … off. Let me explain…

For the Restaurants section, we have only done an initial stab at loading restaurant data. We are actively gathering additional data, with the ultimate goal at launch to be the single most comprehensive, most usable restaurant listing site in Omaha. Its a lofty goal, but one I’m confident we can hit. Bear with us though, during this *beta* period. We’re working on it.

For the News sections, we are currently pulling in news articles every day from the various sources (Omaha.com, KETV, WOWT, The Reader, etc). Once we have them in our system, a set of human eyes needs to “tag” the data with the various topics. Currently, we don’t have the best process in place for this, so you might see some missing tags, and/or completely incorrect ones. Again, we are using the “beta” as a time to figure out all of these details, so again… bear with us!

If you have any problems or anything with the data, please don’t hesitate to email us and let us know!

info [at] betteromaha [dot] com

After many long months of desiging & developing, we’re very happy to have finally unveiled the BetterOmaha project!

This blog will serve as the most up-to-date place to get the lowdown on new features, bugfixes, and other commentary regarding local websites, specifically with regards to local news media.

What is BetterOmaha?

BetterOmaha is a site devoted to improving the online experience for individuals wanting information about the Omaha metro area. Specifically, we provide:

• All of the local news sources, clustered, and all in one place
• Enhanced “meta data” about articles… Tags, authors, etc
• RSS Feeds for everything on our site… subscribe to a single topic, or a specific author
• Comprehensive Restaurant listings
• The ability to search through 8+ years of data from the local news sources
• Comment and discuss any article or restaurant on the site
• And so much more!

How exactly is it Better?

Good question! Here’s just a few ways …

• No popups. Ever.
• No peel-down ads, big blinking ads, or nasty ads in general. Ever.
• Clean, polished, well-thought-out design
• And many more!

Over the next few months until we launch to the public, I will be highlighting each of these features, and enhancements, and will go into more depth about why exactly we feel that our approach to the news and to local information, is that much better.

Lastly, thanks to everyone who has supported us over the past few months, and thanks especially to those who have taken the time out of their days to check out our site. We truly believe in building community, and *that* we cannot do without the support of the people using the site. So a big thanks!

Let us know if you have any questions/comments/concerns/suggestions/etc … email:

info [at] betteromaha [dot] com

Cheers,

The BetterOmaha Team