Update today: By popular demand 8aweek is now compatible with Firefox 3 release candidate 2 (rc2). You can update your version here.

Last night we had an extended server outage due to Amazon EC2 hiccup. EC2 is the hosting infrastructure we use, which stands for Elastic Computing Cloud, meaning we can add or remove servers dynamically based on demand. While Amazon's outage itself only lasted about 2 hours, it returned our servers into a problem state that took awhile longer to fix. Everything should be back to normal now though!

Lately you may have noticed some service interruptions with 8aweek. No, it wasn't just your computer - it was in fact our servers. 8aweek has grown bigger and faster than we had anticipated, and this was causing some real growing pains for our database and server. As a result, it was hurting the performance for everyone using 8aweek.

To deal with this, we had to take some drastic measures. Our database was getting too large, collecting over a million browsing statistics every day, so we began constructing summary tables to hold the data in a much less resource intensive manner. We anticipated these new structures would increase performance of your habits page by 10x, and prevent the sporadic slowdowns you may have been noticing recently.

However, during the process of restructuring our database, some of the data was corrupted and destroyed, so your historical habits beyond the current day might be missing - however, the historical report card grades all remain. All your habits from here on out will be saved appropriately in the summary tables, and you should notice no difference except for faster performance!

We apologize for this hassle, and thanks to everyone for sticking with us through our growth spurt!

We experienced a wonderful Digg effect today. And by wonderful I mean painful and server clogging! So for all you new users, Welcome to 8aweek! For everyone who noticed the downtime, we apologize completely and we assure you we're constantly working to improve our stability.

We've been crazy busy with dealing with investors, preparing for Demo Day and maintaining our current product but managed to also get out our latest feature. Two nights ago, with no announcement we released 8aweek Reports!

Its incredibly helpful to know where and when you're spending your time online. 8aweek habits lets you see that info. But until now you had to make your own conclusions of how you're doing based off of that data. 8aweek Reports now analyzes your habits for you and grades you against user averages based on these three "subjects".

Batching

This subject rates you on how well you group your time online. Ideally you would do all of your browsing in a few chunks of time during the day. Conversely its bad form to be checking your email, digg, or other sites every 5 minutes. Batching calculates the standard deviation in the time between page visits. In other words, you can put larger periods of time between your browsing sessions to improve your Batching scores.

% Restricted

Usually you don't want to be spending the majority of your time on your restricted sites. Hopefully most of your time is spent using the web productively. % Restricted measures the percentage of time you spend on your distracting sites and gives you a better grade if it is low.

Overtime

In your preferences you've set up how much time to allot yourself on your restricted sites. If you stay within that time you get an A for this subject. If you disable 8aweek or choose to cheat and go over your alloted time you start losing points in this subject quickly.

We'll be improving reports dramatically. We already have a few other subjects under development, more explanations, charts, and advice on how to improve your grades. For now you can get a small explanation by selecting the question mark next to each subject.

We think this is a big step in not just giving you the tools to control your web habits but also visualize how they're working and get tips on improving them. The calendar is also a great visual for comparing your habits on any given day to days in your past.

Many other small fixes were deployed in this release. We now finally have a feed on this development blog. On a related note, Zack and I started a new blog called Leaving Corporate where we talk about our process of leaving IBM, moving to Silicon Valley, Y Combinator, and making this product.

We've had a handful of Firefox early adopters who've been calling for 8aweek on Firefox 3 Beta. And now we've got it ready.

We fixed the compatibility issues quicker than we anticipated, so we snuck this update in after the big update earlier today. So just let Firefox update you to the latest version and you'll have all the goodies. We apologize to those users who already updated earlier today!

As always, send us some feedback if you run into any issues or have requests. For the hundreds of you who have send us messages already, I'm sure you'll attest that we read every message and answer within minutes (ok, sometimes an hour).

We released a big toolbar update today: 8aweek version 0.3.2.0. Your Firefox browser should automatically tell you it found this update when you restart, but if you want to grab it now, go to Tools and select Add-ons. Then highlight 8aweek and choose Find Updates. Firefox will then download and restart with the new 8aweek toolbar installed. It's that simple and all your account info will remain.

Here's an overview of the included updates:

• Improved habits accuracy - There have been a few inconsistencies with the habits tracking, but those should be fixed with this update.
• Fixed "home" button - The "home" option for a blocked site would break for some instances previously, but no longer!
• Customization - You can now place the toolbar elements anywhere in your browser (more about that below)
• Other small bug fixes

Customization of the toolbar was the #1 feature request we got. And so we delivered! If you want extra space in your browser, you can place the 8aweek icons elsewhere to make more room.

Simply select View then Toolbars and Customize from your Firefox browser. After the toolbar palette pops up, drag the 8aweek icons from their existing location in the toolbar to where ever else you'd like to place them. Or you can drop them back onto the palette to remove them from the toolbar. If you place them all elsewhere, you can then remove the empty toolbar from view by unchecking 8aweek in View then Toolbars.

You then have the 8aweek icons in a nice, compact form! If you want more detailed instructions, please see the customization tutorial.

We deployed several fixes and features today. We're in the middle of a few major additions but decided to filter out some important things and deploy a few of them early.

By popular demand google applications are trackable in the habits now. We've had a lot of requests for this. 8aweek by default groups your browsing habits by domain. But there are some annoying sites out there (ie Google) that like to put lots of useful apps at random sub urls with no format consistency.

At first we were just going to split out the google apps but we decided to make it a little more general. There is now a habits tab in the preferences and there you can add extra urls that you want to track separately from its domain (example: mail.yahoo.com). We set up a few google apps as default, but they can also be removed simply from that page.

Also on that page you'll notice the sites that you've chosen not to track. A few users have accidentally chosen to un-track pages that they didn't want to permanently un-track and there was previously no way to get them back. The Preferences Habits page lets you double check on those sites. There you can now choose to start tracking that site again, or hide from view and never track. We're debating the balance of usefulness vs annoyance of this feature. Let us know what you think.

Another big request was being able to restrict pages directly from the habits. The restriction will not happen instantaneously until we release the next toolbar in a few days. (Hint: for now you have to visit the restrict page for the toolbar to pull in the changes.) We wouldn't have thought of this feature without feed back on it so thank you to those who requested it.

Other additions include longer time periods to the habits view, some fixes to some ajax, line spacings in the feedback, a more organized save page and several other things that I can't remember right now.

Our next update will be a customizable toolbar! The toolbar is pretty sizable right now and non-adjustable. Making it smaller has been our number one request lately and we're working hard at it. We're also in the middle of some cool new ways of viewing your time online and more enhancements to the restrictions such as being able to automatically and temporarily restrict links taken from a social news site such as reddit, digg, etc. Make sure you send us some feedback to get your requests are in our upcoming releases.

As you may have noticed by now we finally got a chance to finish some necessary improvements to the habits. Now you can actually see more than just the past 24 hours! We launched with things crammed down to the wire and in our naivety, expected to be able to deploy that "feature" before anyone would even notice. Thanks for being patient! It only took an extra few days and we added quite a bit more functionality and fixes that were requested through feedback. Here's a screen shot:

The additions include a chart that shows your browsing totals and a pie chart to give a better percentage visual of how you're spending your time. Ideally you want the pie chart to be as blue as possible (without cheating of course).

A few people (specifically in time-zones larger than 6 hours away from ours) reported issues with not being able to see their habits after a period of time. That was an issue with time-zones getting screwed up. I fixed a bug in my datetime routines and it should be working now. Let us know if you're still having problems.

We, along with many of you, have noticed that there are some significant errors in the way stats are collected. Zack has been working like mad on those and earlier tonight claimed to have conquered them. He's testing and adding a few more requested features into the toolbar and will release the fixes within the week.

Again, we're getting really great feedback and love it! Its incredibly motivating, whether its a bug report, user experience, or feature request. Feedback makes sure we're working on the right things and are on track to making an awesome product that will save you 8 hours a week.

Currently we're debating whether to put our next batch of time into enhancing the habits visuals, focusing on improving the blocking mechanisms, creating API's and widgets for exporting and sharing your data, or new features besides blocking, saving and habits that would also keep you from time wasting sites. Ultimately we'll decide based on your feedback so if you haven't sent us anything yet, now is a great time to start.

Many of you probably noticed that we were down for a chunk of today. We could pretend that it didn't happen but... actually we'd love to do that but it was just too obvious :) We optimistically thought that through all of our preparation, scaling would be a breeze. We found out today that that wasn't quite true. We surpassed 2,000 users in 3 days and are handling quite a load. A few of our key queries weren't properly optimized and were taking way too long.

We're moving to beefier hardware, have optimized the queries and are chasing down some more loose ends. Especially with our unique toolbar-to-server relationship, fully testing how well we'd scale was nearly impossible without just going ahead and doing it.

For those of you who stuck with us, thank you for your patience. For those who went away, please come back! We love you, and promise it'll never happen again :)!

We've been getting a ton of great feedback and love it. If you haven't been sending us feature requests yet, now's the time because we're making iterations as fast as we can. A major one we're working on right now is to allow you to view your habits for more than the past 24 hours. We haven't ditched the data, we just have to make some updates to the graphing tools so that you can see it. That should be out within a day or two.

8aweek is still in the very beginning stages of something that we think is going to be really great and effect a lot of people. Thanks for being a part!