Week of technical issues

Posted on May 17, 2008 by pilotoutlook

PilotOutlook.com encountered a week full of technical issues and the site was down for many days large week. This was driven by two changes, which we had done last Friday (5/9/2008).

  1. Apache installation with Open proxy - We had installed Apache and forgot to close Proxy server. Few spammers got an idea of this and exploited our server, thus bringing it down for almost 3 days. We have fixed these issues but there are still lot of useless requests coming in and eating our bandwidth.
  2. SSL installation issues - We had further issues with SSL installation (yeah!, there are paid services coming) and that brought the server down for 2 more days on Wed and Thu.

Good news is that we are back up and all user data remained secure during these changes and we now have it under control.

Have fun using PilotOutlook.com!
Regards,

Rajat Garg

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Airport page redesign and addition of landing videos

Posted on May 2, 2008 by pilotoutlook

Bryan Starbuck from TalentSpring recently organized a usability study for startups in Seattle area. Based on that feedback, one of the first things we tackled is redesign of Airport page. A lot more changes are going to come in the near future.

Changes are -

  1. Larger Google maps for all of airports
  2. Tab view to switch between pictures, videos and maps instead of scrolling down.
  3. Addition of takeoff and landing videos. Check out San Francisco Airport (SFO), Boeing Field Airport (BFI), John F. Kennedy Airport (JFK), Aspen Airport (ASE)

Lot more videos will be added soon …

Thanks,

Rajat

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Goal of this blog

Posted on April 24, 2008 by pilotoutlook

This is my first blog and I felt that it will be appropriate to write up what I expect to do with this blog -

  1. Open a communication channel with the local startup community as well as folks in the industry
  2. Talk about PilotOutlook - challenges and achievements.
  3. Contribute - Given that we are building site in RoR, we will share our key learnings along the way.

With that stated, a little history about PilotOutlook.com. The goal was initially to launch a site where users can find directory of all flying clubs. With that idea in mind, we launched this site in November, 2007. Over last few months, we have added numerous other features like -

  1. Flying club directory with over 3,500 flying clubs
  2. Airport DB of 23,000 US airports + an API to access airport database all of it.
  3. User related features - Log books, ability to join or add a flying club, profile pages, adding pictures, testimonial and scraps etc. We also did a cool mashup of all our users on the home page :-). Search mechanism can also be used to find instructors in the region.
  4. Aircraft DB with over 400,000 aircrafts - users can add their own pictures for each of the aircrafts.

And a lot more is coming …

Stay tuned…

Regards,

Rajat Garg

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