Site Update

The bcaching web site has now been migrated from the shared hosting site to the VPS. This required some nameserver updates and IP address changes which might take a day or two before everyone is affected. Once your browser is pointing to the new site, it will require you to enter your login credentials again the first time you visit.

BCaching Stats July 2010

The past few months have seen explosive growth due largely to mobile apps on the Android platform, and GeoBeagle in particular.

* Over 1000 users uploaded one or more PQs in the past 30 days
* 567 PQs were processed per day on average in the month of July.

Site traffic is still increasing month to month
* Feb 2010: 69,064 hits
* Mar 2010: 94,328 hits
* Apr 2010: 143,208 hits
* May 2010: 168,026 hits
* June 2010: 285,600 hits
* July 2010: 377,313 hits

API requests from mobile apps break down like this for July (excluding login requests, error responses)
* GeoBeagle: 35,998 requests from 569 users
* GeoHunter: 13,770 requests from 122 users
* OpenGPX: 1,522 requests from 70 users
* Blackstar: 897 requests from 130 users
* GeOrg: 684 requests from 27 users

Database is now 5.7 GB with 1,015,261 caches (including 97,245 archived) and over 14 million logs!

A minor release was posted Sunday night to address a few issues.

This past week groundspeak updated the geocaching site and broke a couple key bcaching features:
1. ALL email addresses used on the geocaching site have to be validated now and there was no way to see messages received at your bcaching account in order to click on the validation URL. So there is now a new Email Messages page that allows you to view recent messages sent to your bcaching email address. See this post for more details.

2. Field note processing was tweaked a little here and there and no longer supports multi-line notes in unicode format. So field note files are now being saved in utf-8 format and that seems to have resolved the problem.

The bcaching mobile API synchronization process was also improved slightly which should result in faster response times when requesting synchronization updates.

Finally, the migration from shared hosting to the VPS was stalled for a little while but is back on track. Hopefully that will get wrapped up in a few weeks.