EditGrid Add-ons go live!
EditGrid add-ons finally go live! This is another milestone that EditGrid has stepped ahead, we’ve put forward our vision that EditGrid is not only an online spreadsheet, by riding on the generic nature of spreadsheet, EditGrid could also be a platform for applications to build on!
To Users:
Now you not only have an online spreadsheet to use with, you will find out more and more possibilities with EditGrid. The usages you ever think of with a spreadsheet may be realized by someone else anytime!
To Developers:
Spreadsheet, with its intrinsic user-friendliness and powerful calculation capability, is another dimension of data source that your application can build on. Feel free to take a look at EditGrid Labs. As a heavy open source user, we, EditGrid team, would also like to contribute to the community, so all these Add-ons are released as an open source project. Later on you can build your own add-ons and load it to your EditGrid workspace.
We have 5 add-ons released in this round:
EditGrid Sync
Since the release of EditGrid, we’ve received lots of comments from user concerning their data, and therefore, the birth of EditGrid Sync. Now, you can set a schedule to backup your data daily at a designated time. Not only as a backup tool, EditGrid Sync also allows you to upload/download your spreadsheet right away from your Desktop without opening your browser.
Grid Translate
Ever find out a spreadsheet with data you want but in a language you can hardly understand? Grid Translate can give you a hand. Grid Translate help you translate a spreadsheet into another language with options to translate only a particular column instead of the whole spreadsheet. You may even try using it to do localisation of your software’s system strings.
Grid2Calendar
Your schedule can now reside in a spreadsheet and view in your favorite calender application supporting ical format. (e.g. Google Calendar, iCal). You can build your organisation’s calendar in a spreadsheet then feed it to others.
Grid2Map
One of our vision is to get our user closer to the established technology. With Grid-to-Map, you can mash-up Google Map, too! You can also post the resulting Google Map in your blog!
Search2Grid
Ever want to know how a search keyword performs in Yahoo!, Google and MSN, Search-to-Grid provides a useful tool for your to compare right in your spreadsheet!
All add-ons are still infants - they will keep improving. Got ideas for us? We’re waiting you here.
August 23rd, 2006 at 1:06 am
The recent dns downtime is unacceptable.
August 23rd, 2006 at 2:19 am
I\’m terribly sorry for your inconvenience. We think it is unacceptable as well. Believe me, we have worked non-stop to get that fixed in the past few hours. We\’ll also do all we can do to prevent this from happening in the future.
My colleague will explain what happened shortly afterward.
My sincere apologies to you again. We, at EditGrid, will continue to serve our users with our best.
August 23rd, 2006 at 2:48 am
The downtime is caused by failure in both nameservers at our upstream DNS hosting xname.org. We discovered the problem at around 14:00 UTC. After some troubleshooting to confirm failure from the nameservers, we decided to switch immediately to a temporary provider, zoneedit.com. By 14:30 UTC, we have already switched over the records at the domain registrar to the new nameservers.
The migration process is a bit complicated and demanding. We managed to have recall from memory (in our brain) all the domain mappings that we have defined in the (unavailable) xname servers. Yet we finally did that, and did it quite nice. At around 15:30 UTC, we have noticed updated whois records being published by our registrar. At nearly the same time, one of our testers reported that they can access our domain.
Unfortunately, due to the distributed design of the domain name system, there is simply no way for us to force every nameserver in the world to catch up the new records. That’s why it may take some time for the records cached in your ISP to be updated. This is painful, yet unavoidable. We would like to express our sincere apology to any inconvinence that may have caused.
We have been using DNS hosting service from xname.org for over 3 years. We believe that they are stable, however, we just discovered, after this incident, that their both nameservers are located in France, not as redundant as we originally thought. We will immediately devise better solutions to improve our DNS redundancy. We will try our best to make sure this will not happen again.
By the time I submit this article, 1 of the 2 nameservers at xname have already recovered. I hope that everybody can access our service now.
August 23rd, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Ah, the perils of free as in beer and as in freedom. At least you guys are back up. You guys have a great application, even better than google spreadsheet and way better than irows. And ajaxXLS doesn’t even have any security.
August 23rd, 2006 at 10:30 pm
In case it helps, this is what I see on my end:
Registrar of Record: REGISTERFLY.COM, INC.
Record last updated on 22-Aug-2006.
Record expires on 26-Oct-2007.
Record created on 26-Oct-2005.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS0.XNAME.ORG 195.234.42.1
NS12.ZONEEDIT.COM 64.246.26.64
NS14.ZONEEDIT.COM 209.126.137.108
NS1.XNAME.ORG 193.218.105.149
I also use the free public dns servers on my end, but for lookups:
4.2.2.1
4.2.2.2
4.2.2.4
4.2.2.5
4.2.2.6
4.2.2.8
63.226.12.96
64.151.103.120
216.87.84.209
64.81.159.2
208.185.249.250
then I put our internal lan dns server in the last spot.
What I’ve realized is that those free ones do speed things up really well from a desktop point of view, but when a site is down they serve up ads:
http://kibosig.googlepages.com/editgridgoogledesktopsearchcache.html