Artician Labs

Artician is now accepting Artician Scout Applications

Check it out, see what it's about, and let us know if you are interested!

We have recently begun what we'd like to call "round three" of Artician’s promotional phase. You will notice a large increase of site activity, which in all honesty is overwhelming at the moment. Traffic as a whole will continue to grow rapidly, whether we like it or not (But of course, that‘s why we’re here ^_^). Here are some recent updates that we’d like to throw your way…

Server Updates

We are close to conquering the rest of our Server Maintenance, and Upgrades, which may still cause a bit of turbulence in the near future, but no serious downtime should occur.

Artician Scout Team

We will be making some updates within the next few days about the Artician Scout team. We will begin accepting volunteers, and hope to get a good response like we did when it was initially introduced. More info about Artician Scouts can be found here: http://blog.artician.com/blog/2009/03/artician-scouts-we-want-you/ We are looking for as much help as possible in welcoming new users and guiding them when help is needed. Scouts will also be seeking out talented work, along with the other responsibilities mentioned in the detailed blog post above.

Documentation

On another note, we’d like to apologize for the lack of documentation up until this point. Artician is growing and evolving so quickly that it’s become difficult to keep up with. The good news is, we will be working on new documentation over the next few weeks, including screencasts and more interactive tutorials to help users with Customization, Account / Profile Management, and all the other yummy stuff.

Groups are coming soon!

We will soon be finishing the Artician Groups System, which we know you are all waiting for so patiently. We are confident that it will bring about new aspects of social activity and interaction on Artician. Groups will first be rolled out to Beta Testers and Artician Pro users, as it will still be in beta. However, it will only remain in beta for a very short time since groups has been pretty well tested thus far.

Keep on Truckin’…

We are working on a whole bunch of other stuff behind the scenes, which of course will make it to a browser near you! Thanks for all the community support!

Literature

Literature Submission category is now live. You can submit text-based submissions such as poetry and prose. Please note that importing literature from other sites is not yet available.

Artisan Crafts

Another new media type has been added called "Artisan Crafts". The purpose of this new category is to handle tangible artwork, such as sculpture, woodwork, etc. If you have any submissions that were previously categorized in Art and Photography, that need to be updated, you can use your Portfolio Manager to do so.

The server doctors are in the house…

As you may or may not have noticed there was some unexpected downtime during the past few days on Artician. Instead of moaning and groaning about the server maintenance, we decided to take advantage of this time to update our infrastructure to help prevent future downtime due to performance issues, and hardware failures.

What caused the downtime?

Over the past few days, Artician’s primary static content server decided to act a bit silly. No, but really, the current raid system needs to be resynced, and due to the size of our storage this process just isn’t that easy. There was no data loss, and your stuff is safe. We even decided to begin storing an additional offsite backup of our entire infrastructure, just to be extra safe. As a result, some features are still temporarily unavailable, such as: Submitting, Portfolio Manager, Customization, and Profile Image Uploading.

How will we prevent downtime in the future?

With Artician’s current cluster of servers, each machine maintains a particular role and handles specific tasks assigned to it. When any given machine has a performance or hardware failure, it could result in serious compromising of Artician’s functionality. As we all know, hardware could go bad, and it’s not something we should ever play a game of risk with. Even though we always keep backups of everything, the time it takes to restore a server’s state from a hardware failure could take hours, or in worse cases even days. We are now establishing a virtualization process to re-comprise our server infrastructure into a virtual cluster. Running at native speeds, each machine will no longer be forced into only being able to handle its own tasks. If any hardware or performance failures occur on any individual machine, we can easily clone the tasks of that server on any other machine to prevent downtime or feature unavailability. This will provide us the flexibility we need when dealing with future system maintenance, upgrades, and expansion.

When will everything be cool?

We are hoping to have the site back to normal early this week, but stay check back soon for future announcements. There is no need to worry, Artician will be back to 100% in no time, and we will be looking forward to round three of our promotional stage.