So recently it was brought to my attention that I haven’t updated the developer blog here since January. Thanks for the reminder, Amanda!

There have been a few things going on, not the least of which is the website having some trouble over the last couple of weeks. Many thanks to those of you who have written me with error messages, I always appreciate that. It helps me focus on where things are going wrong.
Tonight I’ve finished replacing a couple more machines, and so I hope that we’re going to be running stable for some time now.

Just before the website headaches I launched a brand new website, Blue Heron Classifieds. It is the first time I’ve built a site with a facebook login, but for those who prefer not to use facebook, Blue Heron is also built on top of PW Classifieds code, and you’re PW login will work there as well. You just log in here.

Early signins get a $40 credit, so if you think you might have something to advertise in the Chesapeake Bay region, you might stop in and check it out.

–Chris–

I don’t know how many people saw the blackouts on Wikipedia, Google, and other sites yesterday. I only became aware of the impeding blackout about 10 hours ahead of time, and it wasn’t enough time to prepare anything here. I suspect most of you preferred not to have the site interrupted anyway. The essence of it is that congress has been considering several proposals to alter the way the internet currently works.

Right now if someone posts an ad on Pennswoods.net offering to sell illegal drugs, pornography, etc any law enforcement agency interested in prosecuting can enlist my help in tracking down the lowlife.

Under several of the proposals, in particular the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), would put the burden of enforcement on the web sites. Under the proposed law if someone posted an ad stating they were willing to pirate music, software, sell drugs Pennswoods.net would be responsible as if we posted the ad. Every day I remove ads for that sort of crap, as well as ads from scammers all around the world. I don’t have the budget for that sort of continuous legal defense under the new proposed laws.

To read more about it, visit Wikipedia.

–Chris–

Tonight starting a little after midnight I’ll be doing the last of the end of year maintenance on the databases that power the PW Classifieds. I’ll take the website down shortly after midnight, and I’ll bring it back up as soon as I am have it finished. Unless you happen to be using the site during that time frame, you are unlikely to see anything different.

–Chris–

Tonight I’m going to be working on bringing our databases up to date again. The website will be occasionally unavailable between 1am and 5am tonight. Thank you for your patience.

–Chris–

I hope everyone is having a splendid new year, may it bring you all the best in life.

This week I’m doing some house cleaning on the databases. I’ve had the databases (and thus the website) down intermittently between 2am and 4am. Thursday (5th) and Friday (6th) mornings I’ll have the databases and website down intermittently between 1:30 am and 5am. I realize that there are some people accessing the site during that time, and I apologize for the inconvenience. I always do my best to minimize down time, but in this case it is unavoidable.

–Chris–

Merry Christmas everyone! It’s been another grand year here at Pennswoods.net, thanks to all of you loyal fans who come here to buy, trade, and sell! I hope that you have a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

–Chris–

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you all enjoy the holiday! Thanks for visiting Pennswoods.net Classifieds!

–Chris–

Small Business Saturday, sponsored by American Express, is on November 26 this year. This is the second year AMEX has done this. It is the Saturday after Black Friday and is aimed at bringing attention back to the small businesses. It is good to see a major corporation like American Express trying to get people back to “Mom & Pop Shops” and the Brick and Mortar businesses of USA.

–Chris–

About a day ago (sometime Saturday evening) the Pennswoods.net Classifieds databases started to fall behind in serving up the data necessary to operate the classifieds. Normally this would cause a few slow page loads, maybe a few blank page loads, until things came back up to snuff.

Unfortunately this weekend my wife and both my sons were ill, and I wasn’t paying close attention to what was happening. The databases never managed to catch up, and this afternoon it got bad enough that weird things started happening. Ads wouldn’t delete, some ads wouldn’t show, etc. I’ve corrected the underlying problem of insufficient database capacity (I just added another machine to the mix), but some of my databases are still as much as 17 hours out of date as I write this. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, as now that the pressure has been relieved, those databases should catch up to date within the next 20 minutes or so. I’m going to go now and write responses to those of you who have queried me on the strangeness.

My apologies for the difficulties, and thank you for bearing with me while I get things back up to snuff.

Chris