Those of you who log into w8track with a Yahoo! OpenID may have noticed a warning message the last few weeks from the login page. It read something like this:

Warning: This website does not meet Yahoo!’s requirements for website address. Do not share any personal information with this website unless you are certain that it is legitimate.

If you did see this message, there wasn’t really a problem. The boring technical details are that Yahoo! could no longer find the OpenID service endpoint on the server because the main application page was responding with a redirect status code that sent the browser to the content front page. I worked around the issue by having the application page respond with a normal status code and using a meta-tag to do the redirect. The side-effect is that you may see the redirect page for a brief moment when you first arrive at the site.

A few users of the weight tracking application noticed some error messages that started appearing at the top of the content pages late last week. It appears to have been a problem with the configuration of the content caching system. I believe the problem has been resolved. I want to thank users for their continued vigilance and for keeping me posted when things go awry.

w8track had several minutes of unscheduled downtime last night around 7:30 Arizona time. I run a very minimal server, which had already been pushed close to its limits before I made the announcement about the new features. With the increased traffic, it ran completely out of memory and swap space and stopped responding to requests. The good news about virtual servers is the memory allocation can be increased on very short notice, and the problem was resolved quickly. The application is up and running better than ever.

I pushed out some cool new features to w8track this afternoon. My wife’s had one question every time she’s entered her weight: How much weight have I lost? For weeks she’s been bugging me for a feature that would answer the question at a glance. Now she has it. Above the 30-day chart, you’ll now find a table of maximum and minimum weights and the spreads between them for 7-day, 30-day, and 90-day periods, and also the weight at the beginning and the end of the same periods, along with the net change. Combined with the chart, you’ll get a whole lot of information for a small investment of data.

At the same time, I pushed out a few minor changes. When the server is overwhelmed, it wasn’t always obvious that the main page was trying to gather your login information. I’ve fixed the problem with a simple “Loading” graphic. It goes away when the login box appears. Pretty straightforward. I also made a few minor stylesheet changes.

As always, I value user feedback. I wrote this application to scratch an itch, and it took off from there. Suggestions from users have made this a better application for you, and for me too. You can post them here, shoot me an e-mail, or follow me on Twitter if that’s your thing.

More changes are coming to w8track in the days ahead. I’m working on a feature that will allow multiple OpenID accounts per identity. I’m also working on a Twitter interface, something I’m very excited about. Stay tuned!

I began migrating w8track to a new server last night. The application was previously on shared hosting, and it wasn’t working out the way I’d hoped. I moved it to a virtual private server, which should be more reliable. It also gave me the opportunity to customize the configuration, streamlining the services for this specific application.

Before the migration began, I put both servers in read-only mode and copied all the data from the old server to the new server. Then I took the new server out of read-only mode, leaving the old server online as read-only. It only took a few minutes, and most users probably never saw the read-only message from either server. However, because of the way DNS propagation works, there may still be a few of you who’ll see the old server for another day or two. Please be patient, and eventually you’ll be redirected to the new server.

After the migration, you’ll notice a number of changes in the site. The front page is now in a blog format, allowing me to get announcements out more quickly. You’ll also notice the Google advertising is back on the front page and the other content pages, but not on the application pages where you enter your weight and view your progress. This is because the other pages don’t generate enough content to produce good advertising results. In the future, I may use that space for something else, but for now it’ll remain blank.

Thanks to the new blog format, you’ll now be able to post comments. The blog software accepts OpenID for user authentication, just like the w8track application. You’re welcome to use the same OpenID for the blog and for the application, but you’ll have to log into both systems separately. On the other hand, if you use a different OpenID for each system, you may maintain some degree of anonymity between the comments you leave and weights you enter. It’s up to you.

The w8track community is small but steadily growing. In the coming days, I’ll be adding some of the first user-requested features. I’ll be looking forward to your feedback.

w8track is a service that provides incredibly simple weight tracking and charting. It’s ideal for people on a diet, who are trying to gain or lose weight, or who are monitoring health conditions.

Weight fluctuating daily?

w8track automatically computes 7-day and 30-day moving averages from the data you provide, allowing you to focus your attention on trends rather than normal day-to-day fluctuations.

It’s free and simple!

w8track uses your existing Facebook, Yahoo!, or Google account or any OpenID to sign you in. You don’t need to create a new user name or password. Free w8track accounts are available to everyone.

Start today by recording your weight. Then come back tomorrow and repeat!