We’ve got a great new release tested and ready to go, so we’ll be putting the site into read only mode tonight sometime after 10pm Pacific. In theory, it should only take 30 minutes or so, but you never know.

As always, we’re hoping to not take the site offline at all, so your photos will remain up, online and active.

Once we’re done, you can read up about what’s new over on our Release Notes blog. If you want to keep up-to-date on all the software releases, I recommend you subscribe to this blog, the Release Notes blog, and Don MacAskill’s blog (our CEO and Chief Geek).Thanks for your patience, and I hope you love the new stuff!

By popular request, we’ve started an external status blog. On it, we’ll note both planned and unplanned outages or reductions in service. The important thing here is that it’s hosted at WordPress, so even if all of SmugMug is offline, you should be able to quickly see what’s going on.

We started this blog on January 29th, 2008, and I’m happy to report we haven’t had to use it yet. Tonight that changes, which you can read about in the very next post.

I recommend subscribing to this blog in your favorite RSS reader. We like Google’s best, if you’re curious. While you’re at it, you might want to subscribe to the Release Notes as well as Don MacAskill’s blog (our CEO and Chief Geek).