We detected and fixed a small bug in the citation generator related to ISBN search. In some instances, when you enter the ISBN 13 identifier of a book in order to generate a citation for it, the reference generator would report that the book information could not be retrieved. Unfortunately this happened even for some valid ISBN 13 numbers for which data was actually available. This error has now been rectified.

Yesterday we took the reference generator offline for nearly an hour to carry out a code and database update. The goal was to provide better and more accurate citations, that goal has been achieved even though the site was offline more nearly an hour. We feel it’s worth and hopefully you will agree.

Our service is built by aggregating book information from several sources (you will see these sources being acknowledged when you do a search). Naturally each data provider uses their own format.  We have been dealing that with successfully for quite a while. However occasionally we find that the same provider has subtle differences for different items of data. For example data provider A might have one format format for Catch 22 but  slightly different format for Battle Cry.  We had planned for it and our software is capable of detecting many of these subtleties and dealing with them successfully. However as the site grows and the usage increases, we are discovering new gremlins that we need to address. And that’s exactly what we did yesterday.

Foor example, you might have seen certain results where the authors data of birth had been prefixed to his name or you have have seen extra punctuation at certain positions. You might also have seen extra characters next to the year of publication. All these were manifestation of the subtle difference in formats encountered for certain data items – the gremlins. We are not complaining because the data providers re doing a great service without charging a penny for it. It’s up to us to accommodate them. And that’s what we did through the code updates yesterday.

We need to carry out a minor update to the Harvard Reference generator so we will need to take the website off line today (Friday 26, 2010)  at 4:00 PM GTM/UTC. Yes it’s a a bit of a short notice but the downtime will be less than 10 minutes.

Last week we shut down our service for one hour to migrate the site to a more powerful server. We are already seeing the benefits of this  much needed improvement.  Book searches are now a lot faster than they were before. We have given it a further boost by improving the code that powers the site. To add icing to the cake we have improved the caching mechanism that makes some searches a lot faster than before. Speed is not the only improvement, results are now more relevant and accurate.

Deadlinedue generates Harvard References for books and web pages by aggregating data from several different sources. Data from all the sources are analyzed to and determine which result is the best match the criteria you specified (book title , ISBN or web link). Then we look at the ‘good ones’ again to find out if they contain the full set of information required to generate a Harvard Reference. If both conditions are fulfilled we generate the result and display it for you. Since users often enter just part of the title instead of a full title, there is more work for us!

One of our datasources happen to be the Library Of Congress . However this source was being used only about 25% of the time for title searches and only about 10% of the time for ISBN searches. We have improved our code so that the LOC data can now be utilized for each and every search. However that does not mean all the results you see originate from this source. Sometimes the other data providers may have more relevant or more detailed results and when that happens we use the best possible data set.

We regret to inform our users that deadlinedue.com will be offline from 09:00 GMT on the 1st of February 2010 to 10:00 GMT. Yes, it’s a bit of a short notice and we apologize for any inconvinience faced. We need to upgrade the server and fix an urgent bug. Both these steps are needed to provide you with a better service and to reduce the likely hood of unplanned outages in the future.

Deadlinedue suffered an unscheduled site outage earlier today due to a problem with the database.  The service has now been restored and the database has been repaired. We made use of the downtime to roll out an update to the code to resolve a bug in Amazon Search Module. Our reasoning was that the code update might result in downtime so why not do it while the site is offline anyway?

The website will be taken offline at 0:00 GMT on the 12th of July in order to carry out scheduled maintenance work. We expect to be offline for approximately 30 minutes.

When you generate a reference for a web page, our HTTP client needs to go out and fetch that web page so that we can gather required information such as the title of the page and the name of the authors. We found a minor bug in this HTTP client which resulted in it taking an unduly long time to fetch a small percentage of web pages. A smaller number of pages couldn’t be retrieved at all. In the first instance the output wasn’t effected (it just took upto a minute to produce the output). Unfortunately in the latter case, the generated reference did not contain the title of the webpage. This bug has now been fixed and all cached records have been purged.

DeadlineDue.com, a free Web-based tool by Rad Inks, has already made finishing an academic paper easier than ever by allowing users to retrieve a Harvard reference citation simply by entering the title or ISBN number of a book. Today, the site is expanding to allow users to enter a URL and receive a Harvard reference citation for any Web site.

When creating academic works such as research papers and theses, writers must properly credit the source of words or ideas they have drawn from other reports or papers. One method of doing so is the widely used Harvard Referencing System, also known as the author-date system. But creating a complete, accurate and properly formatted Harvard reference list has traditionally been a time-consuming process. To make matters worse students often leave this for last.

“Harvard reference citations are often error-prone when cited manually. With the launch of DeadlineDue.com’s Harvard reference citation for Web sites, students, researchers and teachers can easily reference works cited without error,” says the Chief Software Architect at Rad Inks.

DeadlineDue.com, launched earlier this year, makes this process fast, easy and error-proof. The Web site’s interface is clean and uncomplicated – users simply enter in the title or ISBN number of a book and the site generates a fully formed Harvard reference that may be copied and pasted into any document. In the event that a query produces multiple results, such as different editions of a book, DeadlineDue.com will display all found entries. From now onwards, users may enter a web page’s URL and have a harvard reference generated for it.

The citation generator was taken offline at 8:11 GMT to carry out the scheduled maintenance tasks as announced earlier. The service was restored at 9:08 GMT after successful completion of the server migration and updates.

Deadlinedue.com is now hosted on an running instance of an Amazon Machine Image. We have embraced cloud computing and we believe that we will now be in a position to serve you better. The system is better able to cope with traffic spikes and provides us with plenty of room to grow. We look forward to releasing the next new feature  – the ability to generate references for web pages by next week.