With rising gas prices and Earth Day a few weeks ago, a recent CNN Money article, caught our eye. We created a Gliffy flow chart to really bring the point home.

Join the movement Green Slow Moving Vehicle Movement or read how driving slower affects the the San Francisco Bay Area commute.

I’m getting hitched in May, and the planning activities are reaching a new high. Part of the challenge is being able to communicate to your vendors what the wedding site will look like, how things will be laid out, etc. For instance, our band would like to know where they need to set up during different parts of the wedding. Our photographer and videographer would like to know where certain things will be located, like the bride and grooms rooms. They also would like to get a sense for what the site will look like, indoors and out.

Well, Gliffy to the rescue! Using Gliffy as floor plan software, I was able to quickly draw and share the diagram below with my vendors to answer their questions. Click the thumbnail below to see the diagram.

old network	improved network

On Monday night we made two significant changes that have us really excited. In one fell swoop, Gliffy has switched over to a much better hosting facility, and we’ve improved our network symbols by giving them an new look are greater variety (there are now over 30 to choose from).
Log in now to try the new symbols, or read more about them below.

About the new hosting facility

• Gliffy, and your documents, will be available when you need them. The hosting service and data center utilize state-of-the art equipment, redundancy, and 24/7 monitoring to ensure virtually 100% uptime and data protection.
• Data is stored in a hot-swappable hardware RAID 1 array, meaning it is written simultaneously onto two hard drives on the server. In the event of an issue with one hard drive, the other hard drive instantaneously takes over.
• All data is replicated onto a separate server. In the event of a failure in the first layer server, the data can be restored from the second server.
• Data is backed up daily and sent to a separate physical location from the first two back-up layers
• The Gliffy hosting service is now monitored 24/7/365, with level 3 engineers on standby to ensure maximum performance and uptime.
• The application is hosted on a network of top brand equipment from Cisco and Foundry in a fully meshed configuration. All core elements, including switches and routers, are fully N+1 redundant.
• The network that hosts Gliffy is connected to multiple Tier 1 providers. This minimizes the distance to the end user for faster performance and ensures redundancy for reliable uptime.
• Our network is configured to transfer traffic to a separate connection in the event of a problem. The redundant core of our hosting network feeds two diverse network connections, from two separate core switches. One connection runs the load and the other stays in standby mode for an instantaneous switch-over if there is a problem.
• All servers are stored in an area with 24/7 security including more than 200 cameras on-site. The equipment hosting Gliffy is in a locked cage.
• The area meets the requirements of numerous regulatory policies, including Sarbanes, HIPAA/CIPAA, and privacy laws.

New Gliffy Features

The improved network symbols are broken out into three categories under the network tab to make your network diagrams extra spiffy:

• Home Network
• Business Network
• Rack Elements

We also added a few other new symbols while we were at it:

• Multi-Document shape (under Flow Chart tab for great Flow Chart diagrams)
• Vertical Wall shape (under Floorplan tab–> Structure/Office options for Floorplan diagrams)

Are you missing a particular shape library you’d like to see? Let us know, and we’ll get right on it!

Lastly, we have included some bug fixes with this release:

• bug fix to drag and drop of uploaded images with thin height
• Made more of a delay before image options button displays
• Added help text to hover over image for options button

As you can see, we’ve been very busy improving the quality of Gliffy. There are many more improvements coming… stay tuned!

We’re always on the look out for how Gliffy is being used out there in the real world. We love to find examples of Gliffy helping people share their ideas with others, no matter how big or small. We’ve already seen a number of uses in the business and educational spaces. Thus, we are going to start sharing some of these with you, our blog readers and Gliffy fans.

For this issue, we found a blog for the study of case-based curriculum of clinical medicine (http://casesblog.blogspot.com/). In there, a blogger was discussing DPP-4 Inhibitors for the treatment of diabetes. The blog posting goes into a detailed view of a new medication called DPP-4 Inhibitor that helps create higher levels of the Glucogin-like peptide (GLP-1), which in turn increases insulin secretion and inhibits glucogen release. This is key for people with diabetes. Now if you’re like me, reading much of the article with my fear of chemistry I got from high school was no easy task. Thankfully, the writer has included a nice easy-to-understand Gliffy flow diagram in the blog to visually show the process of how DDP-4 inhibitors work.

If you have a shiny example of how Gliffy is helping others collaborate ideas, please write me at clint (at) gliffy (dot) com.

Also, if you’d like to use Gliffy to add a live image to your blog or web page, you can use our publish feature. Once you’ve created your diagram, just use Share –> Publish, and Gliffy will provide you with instructions on how to embed your diagram.

In the meantime, thanks for using Gliffy!

- Clint Dickson, Co-founder