Hello all! It’s been six weeks since I got a chance to write a blog post. A lot has been happening over here @ V-CAF and we would like to apologise for not posting.

This post is going to be a little different but hopefully still useful and relevant to you. I’ll be telling you a bit more about why we’ve been away for so long and what to expect going forward.

I was going to write down a day by day journal to post to the blog to show the specific steps that we took to overcome the various difficulties, but because there was so much going on I decided to focus on one thing at a time and do things properly.

The underlying message of this post is to not fret when things don’t go the way you planned and to take your time and seek out the silver lining that may benefit you and others.

• Hosting Problems
• Development Problems
• The New Way Ahead
• Review
• Afterword

Hosting Problems

Our previous host had problems early on when we first signed up with them. They were hacked and all their clients data was held to ransom. As you could imagine we and their other clients were very worried about what this meant for our visitors, and some left straight away.

We discussed the issue with the hosts and decided to wait it out as we believed that they would take the necessary steps to make sure that our data was safe and that they would help us to better achieve V-CAF’s website goals.

Then in mid October our hosts services went down in Europe (where our server was located). There was no warning or email notification. Luckily, I was in the process of doing some site maintenance after paying for new services with our host and saw that there was a problem.

This time we went to the hosts community site to find out what was going on and what we found was terrible. Many European hosted sites were down and had no access to their data.

As we were only using our previous host for hosting our blog and website we took the decision to look for a new host and start the migration process. As we didn’t have the latest version of our changes locally, this process lasted an age.

Development Problems

Unfortunately for us our hosting problems would impact our app development process as we were mid cycle of developing new improvements to V-CAF on top of our previous improvement releases that we timed with Apple’s release of iOS 15 and watchOS 8.

As you may or may not know, we are a small team so resources had to be pulled from development to help with the hosting issues which was keeping us very busy, to say the least.

The new features that we were planning were taking longer than expected due to a bug we found in the development framework which lead to us having conversations with Apple to figure a way around them.

And because problems like to come in threes, we also had personal commitments and issues that also had an impact on how much time we could dedicate to development and fixing the hosting issue.

The New Way Ahead

Thankfully, we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Data on the website is almost 100% restored. Our new hosts have been extremely helpful with getting us back up and running and things are not just back to normal, but better and faster.

Thanks hosting team 🤩

There are new changes coming for V-CAF Stay Awake Stay Alert. As I’m writing this we are waiting for Apple to approve the changes so the new version of the app will be out hopefully at some point this week!

If you’ve got this far into the post, thank you and we want to share the major change that we made to the app with you…

V-CAF is now free to download! When the new release is out, download the iOS version of the app, and then using Apple’s Watch App, download the watchOS version.

You get 3 free launches of the app on the watchOS version after which if you like it please click the upgrade button to do a one time Lifetime access In-App purchase. Click the upgrade button on the iOS version of V-CAF to upgrade both the iOS and watchOS versions and make sure that your Apple Watch is on and that V-CAF is running.

If you bought the app in a previous release, please click the Restore button under the Settings tab on the iOS version of the app, and again make sure that your Apple Watch is on and the watchOS version of V-CAF is running.

If you have any problems please contact us at:
info@v-caf.org

Review

As the picture in this blog post states “Slow Down” seemed to be the message that all these incidents were telling us.

Thankfully the rest of the V-CAF team also picked up on that theme and we slowed down, didn’t panic, and only did what needed to be done on the things that we could work on to get back and go past where we were before.

We hope that you take the opportunity to try out the new release of V-CAF Stay Awake Stay Alert and that you find it useful for your productivity needs.

Afterword

“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson