Unless you've been living under a rock for the past month, you've probably heard of the SOPA and PIPA laws that are making their way through the US Congress. If passed, the laws will require US companies to censor the Internet in an effort to prevent copyright infringement.

We built AppHarbor because we love the Internet. AppHarbor makes it easy for people like you to make the Internet even better by taking the pain out of deploying and scaling web-applications. We feel strongly that the SOPA and PIPA laws, if passed in their current form, pose a grave threat to the free and open Internet that we know and love. For that reason, we support the January 18th protests alongside Google, Wikipedia and many others.

If you want to participate in the protest by blacking out your AppHarbor-hosted application, we have created a Stop-SOPA utility that makes the process very simple. Go to https://stopsopa.apphb.com/ to get the details. The utility will cause a blackout-page build to be deployed for your application in the same way that MaintMan deploys a maintenance mode page. Once you're done protesting, you can push a new build to AppHarbor or go to the application dashboard to deploy a previous build.

The Stop-SOPA utitlity uses some clever new bits of AppHarbor API. We will publish the source code in another blog post in a day or two.

Note that appbarbor.com will be available in its usual form throughout Wednesday 18th, but we support and encourage blackout protests by our users.

The first featured app of 2012 is WorkFu. WorkFu is headquartered in London, but the founding team is spread all over the UK. We talked to Neil Kinnish about the project.

What is WorkFu?

WorkFu is a web application that uses your social networks to find work opportunities that are relevant to you.

You can read more about the project and how it works and follow our progress on Twitter

Why did you choose AppHarbor?

We chose AppHarbor because we needed a reliable, scalable cloud based hosting service. AppHarbor gives us freedom to pick and choose the correct tools for our requirements and budget without locking us down to technologies and without high upfront costs. We also like the fact that we can provision Amazon services in the same location that our application is running.

Which technologies is WorkFu built on?

WorkFu is built on MVC 3 and utilises: Redis, Memcached, Autofac, Lucene, Dapper.net, SignalR, jQuery, Booksleeve, Elmah, MS SQL Server 2008, S3 for file storage and Postmark for mail delivery

We have background services running on separate Amazon instances along with our Redis and Memcached implementations.

How has AppHarbor worked for you so far?

AppHarbor is Superb. There are obvious benefits, such as being able to scale on demand. And it’s a joy managing the work flow through Git, especially as we all work remotely.

I should also mention that the support so far has been excellent.

How often do you deploy new versions?

Continuously. The project is in a constant state of development and progress.

What did you like best? Where could we improve?

One of the most important elements to any service is the support and this should not be under estimated. I’m happy that along with a great service you have got this element right.

Anything else?

Yeah, keep on pushing forward and doing great things.

AppHarbor uses ASP.NET Health Monitoring to log and display exceptions thrown by applications running on the platform. Enterprising AppHarbor users have used this feature for debugging purposes by throwing exceptions from their their code. Throwing an exception is inconvenient however, since doing so interrupts normal program flow.

Below is a simple example demonstrating how to subvert ASP.NET Health Monitoring and make AppHarbor log messages. Logged messages are available for inspection in the application Error Display and logging messages like this does not involve throwing an exception.

Note that this is not anything like a replacement for application event tracking solutions such as Airbrake or Logentries, but it's pretty neat if you just need a simple way to output some debugging information while your application is running on AppHarbor.

using System;
using System.Web.Management;
using System.Web.Mvc;

namespace ErrorLoggingSample.Controllers
{
    public class ErrorController : Controller
    {
        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            new LogEvent("message to myself").Raise();
            return View();
        }
    }

    public class LogEvent : WebRequestErrorEvent
    {
        public LogEvent(string message)
            : base(null, null, 100001, new Exception(message))
        {
        }
    }
}

As of today, you can provision StillAlive as an add-on to AppHarbor applications. StillAlive is a great way make sure your application is functioning correctly beyond just checking that accessing front page gives a HTTP 200 response. With StillAlive you can write test recipes checking that your login flow works, for example. This is a great feature for frequently updated AppHarbor applications

The StillAlive guys have written guides on Installing StillAlive and Creating your first Test Recipe.

Today, we have added Cloudmailin and JustOneDB to the AppHarbor add-on catalog.

Cloudmailin is an incredibly simple way to let you AppHarbor-hosted application receive emails without having to mess with SMTP servers. Simply provision the Cloudmailin add-on, configure Cloudmailin to POST to an url in your app that can receive Cloudmailin posts and hand out the Cloudmailin-provided email address to people that should send emails to your app. There's additional documentation on how to get started with CloudMailin on the AppHarbor support site.

JustOneDB is a fast, no admin, no tuning general purpose database designed and built for the cloud. You can interact with JustOneDB using either a REST API or though a PostgreSQL-compatible interface. We have written a complete sample MVC app using NHibernate interacting with JustOneDB through the PostgreSQL interface. Additional JustOneDB documentation is available on the AppHarbor support site.

We hope you'll take advantage of Cloudmailin and JustOneDB and all the other add-ons in our catalog to quickly build great .NET apps running on AppHarbor. We're working hard on adding many more add-ons to the catalog.

When you visit appharbor.com you will now be browsing the new and redesigned AppHarbor website. We're really happy with the way the new site looks and feels and we hope you will have the same experience using it. A sea dragon called Frode was adopted as part of the redesign and we hope you'll give him a warm welcome too.

If you look under the covers of the new design, you will notice plenty of HTML5 goodness and there is plenty more coming as we build out the interactive features of the new design.

We're getting stickers, t-shirts, sea-dragon-shaped thumb-drives and all the other schwag-paraphernalia of a startup so that you can soon show-off that you use AppHarbor to build and host .NET applications.

We know there are some nooks and crannies that need a little more work (and we need to port the new design to the blog) and we'll be attending to that over the next few weeks. If you find anything that's broken or not looking right in your browser of choice then don't hesitate to report it to support@appharbor.com.

We're excited to announce that AirBrake is now in the AppHarbor add-on catalog. AirBrake is a great way to track errors and exceptions in your AppHarbor hosted application. We have written a short guide to get you started logging errors to AirBrake from your AppHarbor application.

We have just flicked the switch and you can now provision paid add-ons for your AppHarbor applications. You can also upgrade already provisioned add-ons from free plan to paid plans.

When we launched add-ons, only free plans were available. This was because we wanted to iron out any kinks in the add-ons and in the provisioning flow, before taking your money. We are excited that AppHarbor users now have full access to the powerful add-ons in the AppHarbor add-on catalog.

Prices quoted in the catalog are per-month and per-application that you provision the add-on to. Prices are pro-rated for months where the add-on was not provisioned the entire month. To provision or upgrade to a paid add-on, you have to provide a valid credit card in the same way as when trialling scaling

We are aware that add-ons can nominally be shared by multiple applications if you are willing to copy around configuration variables. This practice is not recommended and not supported. This is because add-on providers may at any time update the configuration variables for a provisioned add-on. This may for happen, for example, if an add-on provider's server crashes and your application needs to be made aware of what new server to use. Applications with configuration variables copy-pasted from another application will not get the new configuration values until you actively copy-paste and push the updates.

The Sequelizer add-on has had a 10GB trial plan since AppHarbor's inception. That will now become a paid plan offered for $10/month. If you have provisioned 10GB Sequelizer add-ons and your account has a valid credit card, we will start charging effective December 1. Accounts with no credit card will have a grace period lasting until December 1, after which we will downgrade databases to the free plan (20MB). If the database contains too much data to be downgraded, it will be placed in read-only mode. If you have Sequelizer databases provisioned to any of your AppHarbor applications, please verify that they are provisioned with the plans you want.

Paid add-ons marks the second step of AppHarbor beginning to take money for the services we provide (the first step was taking credit card details to enable scaling). Your input in this process is greatly valued and we encourage comments on this post or emails to support@appharbor.com if you have thoughts on add-on pricing or want to let us know what you would pay for AppHarbor deployment and scaling.

Note that some add-on providers in the AppHarbor catalog do not currently support changing plans. For those add-ons, you will have to remove the add-on from your application and then reprovision it with the plan you want.

Last week, IndexTank announced that they have been bought by LinkedIn. At AppHarbor, we're incredibly happy for the IndexTank team and wish them the best in their future ventures as part of LinkedIn.

For AppHarbor users, the acquisition means that provisioning IndexTank to AppHarbor applications is no longer possible, and that the IndexTank has been removed from the add-on catalog. IndexTank add-ons provisioned on AppHarbor before the announcement still work, and will continue to due so for another six months. We will contact AppHarbor users using the IndexTank add-on with additional details.

We're happy to announce that Logentries is now available as an AppHarbor add-on. Logentries is a great way to collect and analyse log-events for your AppHarbor-hosted applications.

The Logentries guys have written a great guide to get you started using either Log4Net or NLog with their service.

As always, if you encounter any problems, drop us a line at support@appharbor.com