I have tried to avoid downtime as much as possible, but I can not avoid it today. YackTrack will be down this morning for some much needed maintenance from 8AM to 10AM Eastern (US) time (yes, in about an hour). There will be a minor application update as well, but externally you will not see much difference. Disappointingly, I do not have any major new features, just some minor ones and defect fixes.

Identi.ca is now supported for both URL searches and Chatter searches. [Update: In some last minute testing, I found an issue with Identi.ca and URL searches so it will not go live.] This is just the first in a long line of services that need to be added. The search crawler has been updated as there was a defect where some searches were being updated more often than others. Blog comments are being handled a bit differently as well, so there should not be issues with pulling comments for the full feed from the site. This was pointed out recently because of the Lifehacker/DownloadSquad coverage. Otherwise, this update is more about the future. There is a significant amount of database maintenance that will be done that will cause the downtime. The maintenance is some general cleanup, as well as getting the database prepared for some new features that are planned.

So, I apologize for the inconvenience of the downtime, but hopefully it will allow me to present you with a better experience long term. Thank you as always for your support.

UPDATE 12PM – The maintenance is not going well. Various database issues, mainly because I figured this would be a simple process. So, please assume that YackTrack.com will be down for the rest of the day until I resolve all of the issues. I will let everyone know more information when I figure things out.

UPDATE 6PM – The maintenance is completed! Sorry for the ridiculous delays, but databases tend to be a problem just when you don’t want them to, just like children. So, things should be back to normal. If you see any problems please let me know, or email info AT yacktrack.com, or on twitter @yacktrack.

UPDATE 1/11 7AM – I had to pull support for Identi.ca as a whole. So there is no support for URL searches or Chatter searches. I am not sure what happened as it all seemed fine during testing and the first few minutes after the updates. I guess it was just par for what was happening yesterday.