Interface and API upgrades

We’ve completed a number of upgrades to our member interface and API. We’ve implemented some enhanced reporting features, some help for domain renewals, and DNS API functionality.

API Additions

We’ve implemented all of the DNS API listed in that section of the API Reference. Check it out! The Wiki information for this section of the API will be updated soon, if not already.

As a side effect of this update, support for AAAA records (IPv6 addresses) was added to the API, and to the member interface.

There have been some other small additions to the API, and at this point, I think most of the commonly requested functionality is in. I guess we’ll be needing some more requests on that front.

Domain Renewals

We’ve added a “Renewal Monitor” action to the Domains tab. You can use this action to get a summary of all of your domains and how close they are to being renewed. It also shows you whether the domains are locked (locked domains can’t be renewed), and gives you links to unlock and renew, as appropriate. Because we have to query a lot of information out of the live registry to generate this report, it can take a really long time if you have a lot of domains, so be patient.

We’re working on a way to keep an accurate, up-to-date cache (your domain’s renewal date isn’t the sort of information you want to let get out of date) of domain-related information without punishing the registries with constant queries for updates that may or may not be viewed.

Enhanced Bandwidth & Storage Reporting

When we introduced our feature voting tool, two proposals shot to the top, and we’ve made some good progress on one of them. Our reporting features have always been a bit underpowered, slow, and have suffered from some irritating issues related to time zone handling and the choice of cut-off times.

After a long and painful battle with code and the joys of MySQL’s InnoDB query optimization, the updates to our bandwidth and storage reports are now complete. First and most important, they’ve been overhauled to show pretty graphs. Second, they’ve been modified to deal with real days, so the end of the report doesn’t wither away as the day goes by. Third, all of our report data has been standardized to UTC (GMT) time.

We’ve also got all-new account overview reports for bandwidth and storage, found in the Actions box on the account detail page for each account. These include “now” reports for bandwidth and storage, so if you log in and need to find out which of your sites is being a hog, you can get the information with just a few clicks. There’s also an account bandwidth summary report, which shows the relative usage of your busiest sites (defined as a site that uses more than 5% of your total bytes) over time.

Last but not least, any report that’s available is also available as a downloadable CSV file.

Still on tap

This is just a checkpoint on our road to future improvements. There’s a lot more on the way.

• To complete the “enhanced reporting” project, we’ll still need to give the account activity report (the $$$ report) a similar facelift and functionality boost.
• We’ve also got the other top-requested feature, cron support, on the way.
• We’re planning to upgrade the renewal monitor, to make it faster and easier to use, and once that’s ready, we’ll use that technology to speed up the rest of our domain registration interface.

If you like the API and Enhanced Reporting updates, say “Thanks!” to Thomas, our hardworking student intern, who did a lot of important work to bring both of those projects to fruition.

9 Comments

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1. Thanks Thomas!

   Comment by Richard — April 3, 2007 #

2. Thanks Thomas and everyone else. The new graphs are very helpful. NFS is the best.

   Comment by Carey McGee — April 3, 2007 #

3. I’m implementing your DNS API right now. This is awesome.

   Comment by Jeff Johnson — April 4, 2007 #

4. hi team nfs

   thanks for the new features – they are really useful and are saving me a lot of time.

   thanks for hard work thomas.

   keep up the good work guys.

   Comment by kosta — April 7, 2007 #

5. If AAAA records are now available, doesn’t this mean that you should close voting on the feature request titled “IPv6 record support in DNS”?

   Yup. We’ve closed several feature votes that suggested things we’ve picked up along the way. -jdw

   Comment by Tim Nelson — April 9, 2007 #

6. Thanks Thomas!

   Comment by Monkeys — April 9, 2007 #

7. NFS is so cool. You guys are the best!

   Comment by swampopus — April 9, 2007 #

8. This is all very nice and useful. Thanks Thomas, thanks everybody.

   Comment by Karen — April 17, 2007 #

9. thanks for all your hard work. It is appreciated!

   Comment by matt wilkie — April 23, 2007 #

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