I’m in Harrisburg this evening, and will be until about mid-day tomorrow.  If anyone is interested in meeting up, drop me an email at classifieds@pennswoods.net.

Chris

So the site seems to be functioning up to speed again, and I’m just about caught up with responding to emails.

A couple of things cross my mind right now.  One, please be civil.  I don’t want to be anyone’s baby sitter.

The second thing is that email addresses are not permitted in the ads.  Email addresses in ads attract the scammers and spammers, and they are hard enough to fend off as it stands.  I also get the occasional person who thinks I sell their email address.  I never have, and never will.  But then someone posts their email address in an ad, gets a ton of spam, and thinks I sold the address.

Phone numbers, while I discourage it, are permitted in ads.  I get a little chuckle out of things like this:

Thanks for looking, and if you feel like calling me with questions, please feel free to do so @ Five-7-Zero/3-six-7/8-zero-6-zero

I suspect that fails to achieve the purpose of getting the contact information out there, and if some crank calls you because you published your phone number, that’s a matter for the police to deal with, not me.

Best wishes to all of you,
Chris

Tonight’s maintenance has gone well.  The database feeding the classifieds sign on is healthy once again.  I’ve not completed testing password changes, etc, but I expect that by later this morning things will be close to normal again.

Chris

As of right now, I apparently am still unable to activate new signups, and password changes and email address changes are frequently failing.

Later this evening I intend to take the databases down in order to repair them, and I hope that by tomorrow morning I’ve hammered out the last of the bugs from last week’s hardware failures.

Chris

This week has seen a couple of headaches.    On Wednesday morning I found and fixed an issue that was delaying approval of new accounts.  Then later on Wednesday one of my web servers flaked out, resulting in some 30% or so of visitors between 9:30am and 1pm unable to access the site.

Thanks to those of you sending me error messages, and a special thanks to Vaughn, Atlantic Broadband engineer and Pennswoods web monkey for his rapid response to correct the problem for us!

About three weeks ago I introduced a change that was intended to fix shortened subjects when someone used the single quote (or apostrophe) in placing an ad. In theory the change was simple, just make a call to an html entity encoder for “unsafe” characters, such as single quote, double quote, etc.

Unfortunately it also encoded the ampersand, ‘&’. Since this check would be made when an ad was submitted as well as when it was edited, an ad for a S&W pistol might be properly encoded the first time. It would display as “S&W pistol”. But behind the scenes is actually looked like “S&W pistol”. Then when the ad was edited the ampersand would be encoded again, resulting in this behind the scenes: “S&W pistol”. And that would display as “S&W pistol”.

Several people pointed it out to me, thanks guys! I found a way to fix that this afternoon, and while there are still ads out there that say &, the problem should fade away as those ads are edited or expire.

Thanks!
Chris

February of 2012 was the first month I missed posting some sort of update to in nearly three years.

I thought about this a bit, and came to the conclusion that part of the problem is that my developer blog was tightly integrated into the Pennswoods Classifieds. At times when I was in the middle of some heavy changes that weren’t ready to be released yet, or when I was having technical problems, updating the blog without causing myself additional headaches was difficult.

February 2012 saw a couple of database problems, and some webserver front ends crashing and burning, and I had to choose between fixing the issues, or spending a fair bit of time updating the blog without touch the rest of the site.

While originally it made a lot of sense to have it that way, as the site became larger and spread across more machines, it is becoming difficult to have it work the way it has the last several years.

Thus the changes you see here, with the blog and updates moved into a separate piece of software that can be updated even when I am working on a problem with the Pennswoods Classifieds.

Chris

So, no bites on my April Fool’s joke? I’ll have to try harder next year.

I’ve changed the image server that handles the pictures for the Pennswoods.net Classifieds. This change actually happened a little over a month ago, but I’ve gotten a handful of complaints about blurry thumbnails.

When reposting an ad, the same image from the previous incarnation gets used again. This means that an image could possibly be in constant use for months. When the image was first handed to us, chances are it was compressed and stored in the old picture server. Now when I moved over to the new one, it was handed off from the old server to the new server, and the picture may have been compressed a second time, and the thumbnail regenerated from the twice compressed image, resulting in a somewhat blurry thumbnail.

To fix this, simply edit the ad and update the image again. You should only need to do this once.

–Chris–

I’m pleased to announce that the Pennswoods.net Classifieds division has been sold off to a fellow by the name of Craig Newmark. I understand he has a lot of experience running online classified. I’m sure you’ll be excited to see the new features he is sure to bring, such as the ability for random, anonymous web trolls to flag ads, adult oriented personals, and his endorsement of liberty destroying, socialist political candidates!

I wish you all a Happy April Fool’s Day! Now go get your prank on!

Chris