Between 14:00HRS and 15:30HRS East African Time, our three servers were offline for critical security updates. Each server was off for approximately 30 minutes while the hardware nodes were rebooted after updating the servers.

Here is the notification we recieved from our server provider, which they sent out to all their clients:

From 11pm-8am CST(05:00-14:00GMT) tonight, we will be rebooting Virtuozzo hardware nodes. This is to perform a critical security update to the Virtuozzo software. Total downtime for each server is expected to be 10-30 minutes.

We do regret the short notice of this announcement. However, we feel the need to act quickly to insure the protection of your precious data. We appreciate your understanding, and apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

It’s taking a bit longer than expected, but this is what’s going on. Your server should be back up shortly, and thanks for your patience.

Please accept Node Six’s apologies for the brief time window in which your websites, blogs and services were not available, but the update was essential for the welbeing of the entire system, especially your data and services.

Thank you,

Node Six Technical Support Team

We’re creating this temporarily to get your feedback on the new version of BlogSpirit. Please let us know what your feedback, suggestions and critiques are.

It will help us greatly improve the service over time.

Thank you!

In Brief

If you’re the impatient type, here’s the gist of this post: We need a few people to help us take the application for a spin and tell us how it works or if it sucks. Head over here to register. You will recieve an email in a few days with more instructions.

In Full

First of all, I’d like to thank all of you for making BlogSpirit version 1 such a success. All the little links you’ve been putting on your blogs, the banners, the hype, the word of mouth, we appreciate. Without you, it would be just another in-house application atrophying on our computers. So, yeah, thank you bloggers, you guys ROCK!

Now, there’s some exciting news.

BlogSpirit Version 2 is almost here!

Yup, and we’re just as excited. Why?

The New Features

1. Multiuser support
   BlogSpirit now supports multiple users. This means you can login and choose which blogs you want to follow. You can also add your own feeds, not neccessarily Ugandan. Or you can just choose to view the public feed, which shows all Ugandan blogs on BlogSpirit.
2. Personal settings.
   With the new BlogSpirit, you can make personal settings that are only visible when you login. Like you can mark articles as favourites and view your favourite articles, with one click. No more scouring the web looking for that one article you liked so much.
3. Support for Tagging
   You can tag articles and posts within BlogSpirit. This will not affect the original article, but only the article database in BlogSpirit. This makes searching through blog posts a lot easier.
4. Feed Categorisation
   BlogSpirit now has support for categorisation of feeds, so you can label your categories as business, news, humour, etc and then sort your feeds into those categories.
5. Email Digest
   You can choose to have BlogSpirit deliver an email summary of the latest blog posts straight to your inbox.
6. A better feed engine.
   We moved from Gregarius to Tiny Tiny RSS, a better all round feed engine. This means updates will be faster and less sporadic.

There’s lots more in the pipeline, but first, we need your help.

Since the new BlogSpirit has much more extended functionality, it inevitably means there are likely to be bugs, features and functionality that we haven’t yet fixed, but which require real world usage to fix.

So we’re opening a private Beta testing phase for the new BlogSpirit.

We need a few of you guys to head over here and register for the private beta testing. In a few days, you will receive another email telling you how you can access BlogSpirit version 2.

In lay man’s terms, basically, help us take the application for a spin and tell us how it works or if it sucks.

Please sign up here.

Thank you!

The Node Six Team

Hello good people. It’s been a while since we updated this section. Lots of stuff has been happening, and there’s lots more coming from Node Six.

First off, welcome back from the festive season, and a happy new year to you all.

For those who have stood by us through the past year, clients, friends, family, supporters, we’d like to say a big thank you. We could not have done it without your support.

Node Six is in its third year, and we’re gearing up for some fairly massive changes to the way we do things around here. Let’s just say it’s going to be one heck of a ride.

Also, our focus for this year is going to be online applications, and especially flash based rich internet applications. To start that off, we’ll be releasing BlogSpirit version 2 for beta testing around mid this month. It’s looking pretty different from the current Node Six BlogSpirit.

As usual, the core engine is an open source tool that we’re modifying and customising to be more functional, feature rich and intuitive.

As for the rest of the applications, we plan to roll out/extend six major web applications, some of which are actually already being used. One of those products will change the way Ugandans use a certain aspect of the internet.

We can only hold our breath, and hope that you will love the products as much as we do.