We’ll be performing maintenance Saturday morning at 10 AM CST.  Making things faster than ever.  Expect the service to be a little bumpy for at least an hour or so.

We’ll be performing maintenance this afternoon and rolling out all kinds of new code.  Service may be delayed during this time period.

Watch the blog and our Twitter account (@boxcar) for further details!

We’ll be performing maintenance tonight starting at 9:00 PM CST.

We are currently performing emergency database maintenance.  You will be receiving significantly delayed notifications over the next few hours until this issue is resolved.

Resolved!

As of 1/6/2010, 2:00 AM CST we’re working with Facebook to determine the cause of the outage.  As additional details are made available to us, we’ll update here.

Resolved!

It’s easy to not talk about the changes happening behind the scenes. We’re pushing bug fixes, tweaks and other minor functionality changes to Boxcar all of the time. Here’s a quick rundown of a few recent updates:

New Email Server

We’ve gone through 3 different e-mail solutions now, and finally have one that will scale with us as necessary. The new e-mail backend is faster and has better support for UTF8 characters in ‘From’ addresses.

Trending Topic Alert Messages

At last! Prior to today we’d just push the sound and a badge update. Now you’ll see what’s actually trending, and when you Slide to Unlock, the search query will be pre-filled with the trending topic.

Better UTF8 Support for Notifications

We’ve always had a small issue affecting mainly our Japanese users, in that not all notifications were sent. This was because of multibyte characters, the length of our JSON payload to Apple (ugh!) and a host of other issues. Fortunately, that’s all been taken care of.

Twitter Search Polling: As often as we can

We try and limit how many searches we perform in an hour, at Twitter’s request, and we’ve always been very conservative with how often we perform searches. In some cases, that would cause significant delays. No fun. I’m pleased to say that we’re now checking search terms every 15 minutes for you. We’ll continue to work to reduce that time and have a few ideas in mind for making that happen.

New Twitter Client: Natsulion

Natsulion, an open source Twitter client for the iPhone was just added to our list of Twitter clients. Just refresh your list of Twitter clients inside of Boxcar, and Natsulion will be at the bottom! Not sure how to refresh the list of Twitter clients? Follow the instructions that we added for TweetDeck!

Facebook Notifications: No longer hidden

One of the changes we made last week around Facebook were to always send you any and all notifications, including read ones. Turns out there was one more kind to send: hidden notifications. Somehow, someway, some of our users found a way to hide notifications from the core Facebook applications like comments and status updates. We now truly send anything that Facebook gives us. Read, unread. Hidden or not hidden. If Facebook exposes it, we send it.

One more thing…

Last week we added an additional server to the cluster that may have been causing issues for those of you with both Twitter and Facebook services. Crap. We’re really sorry about that, but fortunately with the help of Josh Gard we were able to pinpoint the problem and fix it. For those of you receiving significant delays in pushes from one of either services (Twitter, Facebook), that should be resolved now.

80% of the maintenance that began almost two days ago is now complete, which means we are able to turn badges back on.  Yeah!

For those of you that had more than 20 old unread notifications, well, sorry.  Your badge just got reset to 20.

Trivia for you: One user had over 50,000 notifications.

With the massive growth Boxcar has experienced in the last month and a half, we’re way overdue for house cleaning. There has slowly been a degradation of services, and it’s time to stop that in its tracks.

As part of the house cleaning, I just kicked off a process that is currently archiving all old notifications.  Each of your services will keep 20 notifications hanging around.  Badge updating will return.  We shall all rejoice and be happy!

So what does all of this mean for you?  Not much, really.  Other than faster notifications (welcome back!) and badge updating again.  Everything else will continue like normal!

At some point in the future, we’ll expose all of your older notifications again - we’re not deleting them, just hiding them away temporarily.  We’ll be periodically running this process to keep a handle on things from here on out!