December 21, 2008
You are more than welcome to take advantage of our last day of $7 shipping, but I need to warn you that even if we package all of the orders on time, the packages still may not arrive in time for Christmas.
All orders placed by Saturday morning have already been shipped, and we were hoping to package the rest of the orders by the end of the day on Monday. However, we have had a series of big snow storms in Seattle. People have been encouraged to stay home, and a lot of flights have been canceled. I don’t believe the post office is operating at full capacity either. The snow and ice is expected to stay through Wednesday, and Seattle doesn’t have the plows to clear up the roads.
We will continue to do everything we can safely do to get your cards shipped and processed as soon as possible, but we are at the mercy of the weather.
We appreciate your patience.
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Posted by Tim Getsch
September 28, 2008
Late tonight we will be moving our servers from one area of our colocation facility to another so that we have room to add a couple more servers. We should start around midnight Pacific Time and hopefully we will be done in less than four hours.
While the servers are being moved, the website will not be accessible.
================ Update: 4:35 AM ====================
Everything is back up and running smoothly. Good night.
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Posted by Tim Getsch
September 5, 2008
If you have been watching the site closely the last few weeks, you may have noticed that we haven’t been adding new cards as rapidly as we normally do. In fact we haven’t put any new cards on the site in nearly two weeks. The reason for this is that we have been doing a major data migration in to sync up with our price guide data provider.
In case you didn’t already know, the book prices we list on our website come from Beckett. If you have visited the Beckett.com website in the past month you must have noticed that their website has been completely re-written. This was an enormous project that they have been working on for the past couple years. As part of that project they have also been re-architecting their systems to support their new website. Once their new site went live last month we had to begin the migration from their old database to a completely new database.
One of the major challanges was importing all of the new data and merging it with the old data, but an even bigger challenge was making sure all of our existing URLs still worked even after all the data changed.
To keep a long story short, I am pleased to announce that after two very long weeks and many late nights the data and the website updates are finally live. Here are a few of the improvements that you may notice.
- More Sports:
- More friendly URLs
- When searching by player, seller, or set, the URLs always stay friendly and readable.
- When paging, sorting or switching views the URLs only become minimally longer.
- This updates should help improve search engine optimization. This is great news for both buyers and sellers. More people should be able to easily find our site when searching for specific cards in Google or other search engines.
- Existing URLs automatically redirect to the new URL format.
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Posted by Tim Getsch
August 27, 2008
Some people are having issues accessing the site. We are working on it and will get back to you when we know more…
=========== Update ==============
Here is what happened. I just talked with support at Godaddy.com. There was a discrepancy with their “zone file”. They have issued a “zone file refresh”. This could take up to 24 hours to be completely resolved, but it may be resolved for most people within an hour.
Click on the following link to see if the issue has been resolved for you:
http://www.checkoutmycards.com/
If you are still looking at the blog after clicking on the link, you will need to wait longer before the “zone file refresh” takes affect for you.
=========== Technical Details =============
Here is what happened today.
We use godaddy.com to control the DNS entries for the CheckOutMyCards.com domain. Under normal circumstances wwww.checkoutmycards.com is supposed to resolve to the IP address of our web server (207.115.68.74). However, around noon PST the DNS settings for www.checkoutmycards.com started resolving to 207.115.68.75. This is the IP address of our email server. Some people who had cached DNS settings were still able to access the site, but some people got the incorrect DNS settings and were not able to get to the site. The zone file refresh should ensure that everyone gets the correct DNS settings, and www.checkoutmycards.com should correctly resolve to 207.115.68.74.
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Posted by Tim Getsch
August 5, 2008
Sorry about the unplanned downtime last night. The traffic on the site continues to rise, and the log files for the website filled up one of the hard drives a lot faster than I had been expecting. This caused the site to be down for a little while, but it was very simple to bring it back up. We have taken precautions to prevent this from happening in the future.
Again, sorry for the downtime. As the site continues to grow, there will be growing pains, but I will try to plan further ahead and announce when we will have to schedule downtime to make upgrades.
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Posted by Tim Getsch
June 20, 2008
Sorry about the website slowness and sporadic down-time this morning. For some reason, Friday likes to give us the most fits. Almost every time we run into any issues it happens on a Friday. Go figure…
Anyhow… In case other web developers run into this issue, here is what happened, and what we did to fix it.
This morning we noticed that w3wp.exe on our web server was using nearly 100% of the CPU and was floating between 3GB and 6GB of memory usage.
Restarting IIS didn’t solve the problem. w3wp.exe would quickly consume all available resources.
Solution: Re-deploy the ASP.Net 2.0 website.
My theory is that the ASP.Net compile state somehow got corrupted. Re-deploying the website simply triggered a full recompile.
The website is back up and running smoothly now.
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Posted by Tim Getsch
May 15, 2008
We finally tracked down the issue. The web server had a setting from a previous configuration that was no longer valid, and this was causing the web server to periodically send web requests off to never-never-land.
This has been cleaned up, and the server has had no down time since the issue was resolved on Monday evening.
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Posted by Tim Getsch
May 4, 2008
Email Backlog
I am still way behind on email. I went through several thousand messages this weekend and flagged ones that need a response. I will try to send responses this week. If you are still waiting on a response from us by next weekend, please send us another message.
Incorrectly Identified Cards
I finally got a chance to go through all of the notifications we got over the last month, and I updated all of the cards that had been incorrectly identified. If you still see some cards that you think are wrong, please click the notification hyperlinks.
Hiring Status
Now that we have more space, we have been busy hiring more people and training them in. Hopefully in the next few weeks I will find some time to update the site with profiles of our new employees.
Network Issues
If you tried to visit the site on Friday morning, you may have had trouble getting in. This was due to some faulty network equipment. I love the response we got from one of our Canadian users when the site was back up.
Whew…I was missing my fix of “COMC”. Glad to see things are all good again. I’m spreading the word about the site and hope to send more cards soon.
HabsFan24
This week we will be installing some new network hardware that should help us better manage these issues. We may have to take the site down for about 30 minutes to install the hardware. That will happen either Tuesday morning or late some evening this week.
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Posted by Tim Getsch
