Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Bonanzle Servers


In case you missed it (because I sure did), here's a note I found on a cached Bonanzle page:

"A quick maintenance note: we will be switching our web host on Monday evening, which will require us to physically move our servers from one location to another and re-setup all of the connections to and between them. We're planning to start the move at 10pm PST on Monday evening, and we'll be back online sometime in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. There could quite possibly be some intermittent issues on Tuesday as we iron out any hiccups that come about as a result of the move."

I spent several hours last night uploading 22 new items to Bonanzle, so it wasn't exactly reassuring to have it seemingly crash for several hours when I went to make final edits. I'm also not thrilled that, as far as I can tell, we weren't notified that this was going on. Right now it's working slowly and intermittently for me, slightly better in Internet Explorer than Firefox. Hopefully it'll be back to normal by tomorrow.

That said, this means I have 22 new items in my booth, mostly reading copies, if that's your thing--highest price on anything is $11.99. I've recently attempted a new method of organizing my Excel spreadsheets (how you KNOW you have too many books . . . ) and discovered I have several books that I've upgraded, so now all my duplicates are up for grabs. I also finally made a Lenora-themed banner for my booth (see above, obviously), which I'm not completely thrilled with, but which is still an upgrade from my previous generic one.

I've also updated my Blogger theme--thoughts? I need to get my Bonanzle widget matching/up and running, which may be fun today. It's an improvement on the blandness before, but I'd still love to have more of a 30s flapper-ish theme someday. I'm slowly figuring out how to modify all that stuff.

7 comments:

  1. I like the new banner, which is quite attractive. I also like the new blog design as well. I'm sure you'll tweak it to match what you like best, but I give it my seal of approval. :)

    I knew about the Bonanzle outage, but that is because I visit the "people" section of the site multiple times per day. On the main page of that section, there is a link to Bill's blog at the top, and each time there is a new post I go to read it. It would be very frustrating to have just listed a bunch of items and then have the site shut down for a few hours. The good news is that this probably won't happen again anytime soon and the site will be faster after these changes.

    On another subject, I've been reading the Billie Bradley books. After reading your posts about fashion in books, I've been paying attention to how much fashion is mentioned. There are some pretty good descriptions of attire in the Billie Bradley books, which I think you would enjoy. I am also gradually liking the Billie Bradley books better and better as I continue through the series.

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  2. I think the banner turned out okay considering how clueless I was (literally, Google search: "how to make banner with Gimp"). I read most blogs through Google Reader, so I would forget how blah my own was until I'd go to post, until I got on a hair last night. I seem to have got my widget working again as well (I could NOT remember where to insert the script, argh)--the transparent option is great now that I have such a busy theme, and I like the new search feature they added since I made my last widget.

    My first thought when I couldn't get Bonanzle to load for awhile was, "Good grief. The site's shut down. I can't BELIEVE I just spent 3 hours loading those books." I think I'm ready to expect about anything in the current economy, even though I have faith in Bonanzle. I'm already up to three sales for this month, which is great, if a little random.

    That's interesting about the Billie Bradley books. I generally find that I like a series less as I go along, and the very best titles are among the first few. The only exception to this that I can think of is Patty Fairfield, although I admittedly don't love the last two titles in that series.

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  3. To know what is going on at Bonanzle there are two places on the site to check.

    Bill Harding's blog; at the bottom of just about every page, the link says 'blog'.
    That is where site announcements are made.

    Bill has another, more tecchie blog called "What's New" there is a link to that in the footer too.

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  4. That's good to know if you're trying to find out what's GOING to happen--the problem was that the blogs were also down. So when I was trying to figure out what was going on, the only way to find out was to google and then look at the cached page.

    Now that I know that we're not going to be notified of things like that, I'll keep a closer eye on the blogs. A recent entry says they're looking for a newsletter writer, so maybe that will be something to look for in the future

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  5. Yeah, it isn't very helpful after the site crashes, is it? I should have posted about the outage in my blog, but I'm trying not to "over-Bonanzle" everyone. I have two groups of readers: series book fans and people from Bonanzle. I write about what I want, and hopefully I don't go on too much about the stuff people aren't interested it.

    If I ever read about another outage, I will make sure I mention it in my blog. I think this one completely killed the site since the servers were disconnected. When the site has a minor outage, you get to see a sleeping polar bear with a message about how the site will be back up soon. I assume there was no message this time. It would be a bit upsetting not to know about it.

    Once Bonanzle gets a newsletter writer, maybe we will begin to get personal messages about outages.

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  6. Hey Lenora, sorry you didn't see the mesasge in advance, and that things were slower than usual for parts of Tuesday. The good news is that after the upgrades (which ultimately took about 8 hours -- the most extensive downtime in Bonanzle's one year history, but we didn't really have a choice about it) the average page load time is about 40% faster than it had been, so posting your items should be a much more pleasant experience in the future.

    Bill Harding
    Founder, Bonanzle

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  7. Lenore-
    Great blog- Love it! I've bookmarked it on my blog- Series Book Collecting here on Google!

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