From what we can tell, things should be pretty much back to normal.  If you are still having problems, please let us know with a comment here or by sending and email to support@footnote.com.

We’re still working to improve the speed of the site and we will continue to upgrade our systems to try to avoid something like this happening again.

We’d like to apologize again for the issues we ran into last week and thank you for your patience as we worked through them.

Overwhelming traffic
The biggest problem is that we underestimated how fast word would get out and just how popular a free 1930 census would be.  The interest has overwhelmed our servers, which has made the Footnote experience slow, frustrating, error prone and pretty much the opposite of everything we work hard to make it.

We are doing what we can to improve the experience and will be upgrading our systems to handle more visitors, but this will take some time.  In the mean time, we expect that as the initial excitement dies down (or is dampened by the slowness of the site), things will improve.

If we can’t get things stabilized in the next few days, we will postpone the free 1930 offer until the systems are ready to handle it.  We hope we don’t have to do that, but we want you to be able to use the census while it’s free and we need to be sure that we provide a quality experience for our current paying members.

We’ll post additional updates about the status of the traffic problems here on the blog.

Confusion about how to get to the census for free
We’ve heard some reports about people having problems getting the free access. To get to the census for free, you have to go through the promotional page at http://go.footnote.com/1930census.  Going through this page allows us place a cookie that gives you special access to the 1930. Once you’ve got that cookie, as long as you are on the site, you should be able to search from anywhere on the site and get into the 1930 census free.  If you close the browser and come back, you’ll need to go back to the 1930 promotion page again.

Printing and downloading
For the first day or so of the promotion, we had an error on the site which was telling people they needed to subscribe in order to print or download one of the free 1930 images.  We fixed the problem earlier this week, so if you tried to print or download earlier, we hope you’ll try again.

But with the tremendous growth in search traffic on the site, we realized months ago that we needed more horsepower.

For example, our 1930 US Census project alone will add 120 million new people and more than 3 million images.

Starting early this week, we began upgrading our search engine. But it’s a feat akin to trying to swap out your 4-cylinder engine with a V8 while driving down the highway at 65 mph.

As a result, some of you noticed some sluggishness in searches – some bumps in the road.

The good news is that the first phase went live today without a problem (20:05 GMT).

Although, we’re still cruising down the highway, it will be a few more days before we get firing on all cylinders.

Once that’s complete, what does all this effort this mean for you? You should see:

• Quicker search results.
• New content and Member contributions will be findable almost as soon as they are added.
• More historical content added to Footnote will not affect search performance.

We know there will probably be a few hiccups as we fine tune this new engine and apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

Please continue to kick the tires and let us know of any issues you find.

Thanks.

It seemed to be something that only happened with certain browsers under certain conditions, so it took some sleuthing, but we found a few things that were plugging up the works.

Last week we rolled a fix that should speed up the site for folks who were having the problem.  Most of the changes happened behind the scenes, but there is one feature that we decided to give up in pursuit of speed.  We removed the “Report an error” links that were under each search result because some browsers were having trouble with them and also because it didn’t look like they were being used.

We’d like it to be easy for people to let us know about errors with the information on the site, because we’re eager to fix them.  We appreciate the great feedback from people contacting us or leaving comments on the site about errors that they’ve found.

If you find errors on the site, the best way to let us know about them is to use the “Contact Footnote” link at the bottom of most pages or the “Flag for review” links that you’ll find in the viewer, on Footnote Pages and Spotlights and in other areas of the site.  The more information you can provide about the error, the better.

Often, when there is a problem, people annotate the correct information where it appears on an image.  This is a great short term fix because those additions will show up in search the next time that image is indexed–usually a day or two.  Even after we fix the error, the annotation makes that information easier to locate on an image.

Commenting on an image isn’t the best way to send us a correction because we may not see the comment and once we make the correction, the comment will be out of date, but we’ve received some great corrections through comments and we appreciate people taking the time to add them.

Thanks again to everyone who sends us feedback of any kind.  Without it, we might never have known about the slowness or many of the errors that have now been corrected on the site.  It’s great working with you to make Footnote better.

The new search is useful because it provides an effortless way to narrow your results.

It does this by using an approach commonly referred to as “guided” or “faceted” navigation specifically tailored to your search results.

What does that mean for you? It means that clicking on any facet, like a Title or Collection, will always give you results. Many might think this is an easy feature to implement, but it is not. It requires a lot of smart software, better metadata and lots of computing power.  But instead of reading more about it, why not check out this 4-minute introduction:

Image Adjustment
We do all we can to get the best quality images on the site, but sometimes the condition of the source images we have (microfilm, microfiche, paper) leaves us with digital images that are hard to read. In some cases, there isn’t much that can be done, but with most of these images, inverting the image or adjusting the brightness or contrast can bring out details that make all the difference.

Here’s an extreme example of an image that is difficult to read:

Here’s the same image with some adjustment to the brightness and contrast:

Here it is again with the colors inverted and the brightness and contrast adjusted:

These image adjustments aren’t magic and can’t make every image readable, but they can make a big difference if you are having trouble making out a word or some other detail from a document. Invert is particularly handy when the original image is a negative, like this example from the Marine Corps Vietnam photos.

In addition to the image adjustment tools, we’ve improved the “Find” tools for searching text within an image and updated the filmstrip to make it clearer where one document ends and the next begins.

Improved Navigation
One other change worth noting is the update we made to the headers across the site. The new design should make it easier to get around the site, use search and browse, access your account and profile items and remember the last 4 images you viewed (”Your Recent Activity”).

As always, we hope you’ll try these new features and let us know what you think.

In the viewer:
Full Screen Viewing: Now you can take advantage of the full size of your monitor when you are reviewing images on the site. Just click the “Full Screen” button in the tool bar of the viewer. Since you can’t enter text while in full screen view (this is a security feature of the Flash player) you can’t annotate, or add other things to the image in full screen, but you’ll get a great view of the document.

We’ve also added the ability to select a specific part of an image to save or print so that you can get just the parts you want.

In search:
On the search results page you’ll find a “report an error” link below the information about each image. When you come across a mistake in the indexing, just click the link, tell us where the error is and what it should be and we’ll see what we can do to get it fixed.

We’re still working on our new search and we really appreciate the feedback we’ve received so far. We just added categories to the Advanced Search page, and we’ll soon add the ability to search within a date range.

For Connections and Story Pages:
We removed a few steps from the process of uploading an image to add it to a Story Page or connect it to another image you find.

We hope that these changes and others we are working on will make Footnote a better place to find, use and share the images and stories that are important to you. Please let us know if there are things you’d like to see on the site.

Updates to the site include:

• A completely revamped viewer
• More improvements to Your Gallery
• One small step in our progress toward a new search

The Viewer
The big change with this update is an overhaul of how the viewer works. We’ll post more detailed information soon, but the short version is that the viewer is now faster, smoother and can support much larger images.

In addition to the behind-the-scenes changes, we’ve added:

• the ability to connect images in the viewer and to see connections other users have made.
• the ability to share images you find. If you are an All-Access Member, you can share premium images and the folks you share with can see them for free.
• a find feature for images that have been indexed using optical character recognition (OCR).
• an option to save an image straight to a collection in Your Gallery.

The Gallery
You can now rearrange the images you add or upload to Your Gallery. To do this, simply click the “arrange” button and then drag and drop the images into the order you’d like. After you’ve arranged Your Gallery, you can always find recent additions to Your Gallery by sorting your images by the date you added them to Your Gallery and then return to “Your Arrangement” using the drop-down menu.

Search
We’re working hard to make searching Footnote easier. The first step, the one we took with this update, is to get the current search working on our new platform. You won’t notice too many changes just yet, but we have changed the default search to AND, so the search will now return results that include all the words you search. You’ll find updated search tips here.

There’s much more to come for search, but this first step will make it possible for us to get moving on the larger things we have in mind.

As always, we hope you’ll send us your comments and suggestions. If you’ll let us know what you want the site to do, we’ll do our best to make it work for you.

The three biggest improvements in the new upload process are:

1. You can upload more files more easily.
2. You get more feedback about how the upload is proceeding.
3. You can choose to put your images in a Collection within Your Gallery during the upload process.

A Few Notes about Uploading

• It’s free. You can add images to the site with a free Basic Membership.
• You can upload as many images as you like.
• Other Footnote visitors can see your images for free.
• You can use Footnote’s tools to enhance, explain and share your images.

How It Works
To begin uploading, go to Your Gallery and click the “Upload Images” button.

(Note: You can get to Your Gallery by clicking the “Gallery” link in the upper right area of the site when you are signed in to your free Basic Member account. If you don’t have a free account yet, you can create one here.)

Then:

1. Click the “Choose Images…” button.
2. Select one or more images from your computer. You can select multiple images by clicking on them individually while holding down the “CTRL” key (Mac: “Commad/Apple”), or by holding down the “Shift” key while you click the first and last file in a list you want to upload.
3. Choose whether you want to upload your images to Your Gallery or to a specific Collection.
4. Click the “Upload Images” button.

While your files are being uploaded, you’ll see a progress bar for each image and an estimate of how long it will take to upload that file. Hopefully this will help you know if you should hang around and wait while the images upload or, if you have a slow connection and you’re uploading lots of files, go get something for dinner while we work on the upload.

As with the other new features on the site, we hope you’ll give the new upload process a try and send us your feedback and suggestions.

Keep in mind that most of these are just the first step toward things that we’re working on. We hope you’ll use them in these early stages and send us your feedback so we can include your suggestions as we work on future versions.

The main additions with this update are:

• New tools for organizing Your Gallery
• An overhaul of the upload process
• New tools for connecting images and explaining their relationships
• The ability to link to or embed Spotlights on your own web page
• An update to our Terms of Use, clarifying some issues about copyright and use of the site by minors
• A new tour page that explains what you can do on Footnote

The new tour page explains many of the other features we’ve added, so I’ll talk about that one here and we’ll cover the others in more detail in future posts.

Take a Tour
You can get to the new tour page by clicking the “Take a Tour” button at the top of the home page.

When you get there, you’ll find a list of things you can do on Footnote running down the left side of the page. Click on any of the items in the left column and you’ll see details about that activity in the right-hand pane.

We plan to add video examples and an updated introduction to Footnote to this page in the near future. We hope the tour will provide the information you need to make the most of your time on Footnote.

Have a look at the tour page and let us know what we can do to make it more useful for you.