We have an update from Heroku 

Again, I apologize 

jeff

I have been frustrated by this outage.  Amazon is giving updates, which claims service is being restored.

Indeed, many of the effected services have been restored, but not Heroku, on which Scholaric.com is hosted.

I will publish my thoughts and opinions on this outage after service is restored.

jeff

Scholaric.com is currently down.

I've been tracking an ongoing issue with my hosting provider, Heroku - which you can see status at http://status.heroku.com

This morning, Scholaric was working properly, but I was unable to use my tools.  This was identified as network connectivity issues, effecting tools.

The underlying cause has now been identified as an Amazon Web Service outage - which you can see on http://status.aws.amazon.com/?a 

This Amazon Outage extends beyond Heroku, and other services, like Squarespace are having problems today also.

I sincerely apologize for this outage, but I continue to be confident in Heroku, the hosting provider for Scholaric, and Amazon Web Services.

As is my policy, all users will get their next payment date moved back due to this outage, and all free trials will be extended.

I will post again when the service is back up.

jeff

Update: The list of effected services include Netflix, Reddit, and Quora, as well as Squarespace.

Update: Here is what you usually see:

We recently attended the St. Louis Catholic Homeschool Conference.

Response from conference was overwhelmingly positive. We met with
 

• Homeschoolers who used competing products and wanted something simpler
• Homeschoolers who used paper and wanted to save time
• Homeschoolers who had lost track of their records and needed to start tracking again
• Homeschoolers whose homeschool was not as organized as they wanted
• Homeschoolers who ran a hybrid school/homeschool and needed a solution
• and some (only a few) homeschoolers who were happy with what they had, and did not want a demonstration.

 
But I did not meet a single:

• Homeschooler who looked at Scholaric and said they liked their current homedchool planning software better.

 
They spoke unanimiously - they were excited about Schoaric’s combination of simplicity and powerful features, and the price was right.

We are more energized than ever

Here are my thoughts and ideas:

There are 2 preferences of note: output order, and page breaks.

Output order would be whether the printout is by day: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc OR by Course: Science (M-F), Math (M-F), etc.

Page Breaks would indicate whether or not Scholaric would force a printout between each of the above, it should be turned on or off.

Finally, I don't like the idea of a user having to click more than once to get to the printout for a student, so I'd need to store whichever you did last in your account, so the next time you click printout, it does it that way.  The problem here is whether you have a preference per student, or would all students be the same.  I'd like to assume all students would be the same.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts and ideas

jeff

We'd like you to continue using the same homeschool planning, tracking, and organizing tools you've come to rely on, but at a new domain, scholaric.com

It is important that you switch to use scholaric.com, because the cogniti.us domain will soon point elsewhere.

Your lesson plans are available there right now, so make the switch today!

Thanks for your understanding and help during this transition.

The Scholaric Team

Goals for 2011

1) An LLC operates Scholaric

2) Customers happily pay for the service

3) Redesign of scholaric.com

4) Potential customers engaged with product tour video and share with others

7) Lessons easily planned for and shared between multiple students

8) A gradebook view of lessons

9) Improved tracking of core hours, home hours, hours by subject

10) Community is giving so much feedback, I have to work hard to read it all

11) Meet 100 homeschoolers by attending homeschool conferences as a vendor

Writing out your goals makes them more manageable.  Where are your goals for your home school, family, or home business for 2011?  Leave a comment to let me know.

You can set your Time Zone (and any other account info) by clicking on your user name at the top of the page.

This is used to determine the current date - the system time must be converted to local time.  Cognitius uses the current date:

* First to highlight the current day, in the planning grid

* Second as part of the prediction algorithm for lesson printouts.  Cognitius tries to know whether you are printing out today's lessons or tomorrows.  It first tries today's lessons, and if all lessons are complete, it assumes you are printing out tomorrow's lessons.  This is intended to prevent you from having to enter a date every time you print your lessons.

See you on http://cogniti.us

jeff

I just released a new feature to Cognitius, which I'm quite proud of.

It's no big deal, about 2 hours of work.  Nothing fancy, it will just save you a few clicks here and there as you do your grading.

The reason I'm excited about this release is because its inspiration it came from you, the user community.

One of our great users posted on our forum a message, which resulted in this release.  Her idea wasn't adopted exactly, but it got me thinking how things could be better.

The problem is this - when you are grading a lesson which has no score, you click on the lesson, and mark it as completed, and hit the update button.  This user, I happen to know, enters the lesson time when planning, rather than grading.  Therefore, this is three steps to do one thing.  She thought like I do - that this is just wrong.

Now, thanks to you, it's now right.  If you have a lesson you want to mark as complete, you can hold down the ALT key and click on it.  You'll see its color change from blue to black. 

If you happen to do this on a lesson which has no time entered, the dialog will open as usual and the ALT key will be ignored.

I hope this feature helps you.  If you haven't joined yet, please consider joining our Google Group and giving feedback, or emailing me directly.  I REALLY want to hear from you too.

See you on http://cogniti.us

jeff