Archive for May, 2007
May 31, 2007 at 2:27 pm · Filed under Bugs · By Elizabeth
As of 2:18 pm EDT. No other info available.
EDIT:
The error page (aka Haim-On-Fire-Page) now reads:
What’s happening: We’re experiencing some hardware issues, and are working to get them resolved as soon as possible.
Estimated downtime: 2:25PM - 2:50PM EDT
EDIT: Now 3:00PM
EDIT: Up as of 3:10PM, no additional info yet.
EDIT: RevolvingDork posted an official word on this. The cause is still unknown.
RevolvingDork says:
Today Etsy experienced an unexpected outage from roughly 2:25pm EST to 2:50pm EST.
We’re still investigating the specific cause of the issue, and hope to be able to post more information on it soon.
We’ll be putting more preventative measures in place to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen again.
Thank you for your patience as we chase down this anomaly!
Posted at 5:53 pm, May 31 2007 EST
[source]
(edited by StarryDesigns)
May 31, 2007 at 1:28 pm · Filed under Etsy Staff, Miscellaneous · By www.bathinginluxury.com aka Soap
The Details:
We’re looking for computer engineers, and we could use your help finding them. If you refer an engineer to Etsy and we end up hiring them, you will be rewarded with a $250 shopping spree on the site!
The specific engineering positions we’re looking to fill (as seen on our Jobs page) are:
* Senior Software Engineer
* System Administrator
* PostgreSQL DBA (DBA)
* Senior QA Engineer
Where can you find engineers? Universities are a good place to look, and so are tech companies. Word of mouth is the best way we’ve found so far: asking friends, asking friends of friends, bridging degrees of separation with social networking.
Just refer them to the Jobs page and/or have them contact us at work@etsy.com. We’ll make sure to ask everyone we interview who pointed them our way. We’re looking for talented, experienced computer engineers, and the interview will contain some tricky technical problems to solve.
To maximize this incentive, if you yourself are an engineer, you can refer yourself and you’ll still get the prize.
Good luck!
From the latest descriptions on the job page, these positions all appear to be in the San Francisco area.
May 31, 2007 at 1:05 pm · Filed under Bugs, Site Use · By www.bathinginluxury.com aka Soap
See those 4 smaller item images at the top of the Etsy home page - the ones to the right of the text Buy & Sell All Things Handmade? Those are called Knock-outs (read below for Jared’s blurb) and now link to their corresponding listings. A bot usually pulls the images from current/new listings. Seems like the bot has been out of commission but Jared says it’ll be back up later today.
EDIT:
What is a Knock-out and how are they selected?
jared says:
I call these the ‘knockouts’. Knockouts (as I define them) are as Stella described, listing photographs where the item is floating in pure white space.
These images are periodically searched for by a robot with harry potter spectacles and algorithms for brains. The robot looks for precisely three things in the first image of recently listed items:
1) the background must be absolute pure white (#FFFFFF)
2) no cropping of the item or it’s shadow
3) no graphic design overlay (watermarks, typography, etc.)
Once discovered, knockouts displayed are randomly with each page load. The images also rotate automatically about every 2 minutes (no need to refresh to see new knockouts).
EDIT:
Bot is all better now! Jared also explains a little more about how the bot operates:
jared says:
Ok the knockouts have been udpated! (you’ll need to clear your cache to see them)
The knockout bot starts at the most recently listed item and goes back from there. It stops after the first 50 are found. So really, the knockouts are only representative of a very brief period of time, usually just an hour of the day.
Yes, it’s not fair. It’s lucky. I wish we could display every single knockout item on Etsy, but it’s currently limited to around 50 for technical reasons.
Posted at 1:44 pm, May 31 2007 EST
May 30, 2007 at 6:00 pm · Filed under Bugs, Site Use · By www.bathinginluxury.com aka Soap
One of Etsy’s servers crashed this morning, causing a chain reaction resulting in some people having issues with the site. All is back on track but if you’re still having issues accessing the site, please follow RevolvingDork’s/Chris’ advice.
RevolvingDork says:
Due to the server issues descibed by Mike this morning ( http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5115541 ), some of you may be experiencing strange cookie and login issues.
If you are unable to log in or are getting an error message about your cookies, try clearing your browser’s cookies. Then, restart your computer.
If you still experience issues after doing this, let us know, and we’ll do our best to help you out!
May 29, 2007 at 7:06 pm · Filed under Bills · By www.bathinginluxury.com aka Soap
Regarding May bills, Chris / Revolving Dork posted Etsy “plan[ned] on auto-charging between the 15th and the 27th” but Emily later posted it looks like “the auto-charge has not gone through yet, and it still may not work this time again.”
From looking at my own bill, it looks like the next auto-charge is scheduled to be between June 15 and June 27 and Feb-May bills have not been auto-charged.
Thanks to electrikolor for pointing me to the threads.
EDIT:
Here is the email etsy sent out to users (I received mine, copied below) April 28 which gives instructions for paying bills manually:
Dear Etsy Sellers,
Due to a delay in the setup of our new credit card processor, Etsy bills will not be auto-charged this month [April]. If you wish, you can manually process your unpaid Etsy bill by logging into your Etsy account and visiting Your Etsy -> Your Etsy Bill. There is a link to pay unpaid bills at the bottom of the page.
Due to this delay, no lateness penalties will be issued for any sellers until after the next billing period.
Next month, all unpaid bills will be auto-charged between the 15th and 27th [of May]. Be sure to check the remaining balance of your list of unpaid bills to ensure you’ll be ready for the charges.
We apologize for the inconvenience! The new payment service we are installing will allow us to expand Etsy into new, exciting directions that have previously not been possible. We’ll release more details about these possibilities in the coming months.
Thank you for making Etsy what it is!
-The Etsy Team
EDIT:
As far as I can tell, the following months’ bills have not been auto-charged - basically any charge incurred in 2007:
Feb 2007 bill - representing charges incurred in January
Mar 2007 bill - representing charges incurred in February
May 2007 bill - representing charges incurred from March 01 through May 29
That’s right, the May 2007 bill represents 3 months of charges. OUCH.
May 29, 2007 at 1:43 pm · Filed under Events, Seller Opportunities · By Elizabeth
From this blog post:
The new deadline is July 16, with the winner being announced on the 19th.
Original contest info here.
May 29, 2007 at 12:09 pm · Filed under Features, Miscellaneous · By Elizabeth
From this thread:
RevolvingDork says:
We don’t currently have any plans to integrate google checkout.
The service has a number of serious drawbacks currently, the most glaring of which is a lack of international support. We wouldn’t want to leave our international buyers high and dry.
We do, however, have other plans to make the checkout process easier that we hope to be able to detail in the coming months.
Posted at 2:35 pm, May 11 2007 EST
May 26, 2007 at 10:07 am · Filed under Treasury · By starrydesigns
The Treasury had a meltdown again and all the lists that were in there are gone.
jared says:
The Treasury melted completed.
I should have it back up and running in just a few minutes, however all data that was in there before the meltdown has been lost. I apologize deeply for this loss.
A complete Treasury revamp will be underway soon. Thank you.
Posted at 9:25 pm, May 25 2007 EST
[source]
We are looking forward to a revamp.
May 22, 2007 at 2:38 pm · Filed under Search, Site Use · By www.bathinginluxury.com aka Soap
According to Chris/Etsy Admin, you need only search for the singular form of a word and the search engine will search for the plural.
RevolvingDork says:
Plurality is handled by Etsy’s search engine, so please *do not* put both “earring” and “earrings” in your tags — you’ll be wasting a tag.
The person who posted the question to which Chris responded was concerned her earrings were not showing in the results when she typed in “earrings” because the tag used was “earring.” Her earrings were being pulled up in the results - already buried 3 pages in.
EDIT:
Search of tags and titles using either the singular or plural of a term seems to pull up identical results, but searching tags only gives a different result. A search of tags seems to only to pull up an identical match. I’ll update here as we receive clarification.
EDIT:
In an older thread on this topic, Chris explained (in March) how tags+titles and tags only searches are handled:
RevolvingDork says:
tags only will also give partial-term matches, but it’s more exclusive when it comes to long search terms.
We have methods built-in to do exact term matching with quotation marks, but they’re currently indisposed as we tune the system up. They should be back sometime this month.
Posted at 4:55 pm, March 6 2007 EST
[editor-added bolding]
I guess that means “earrings” or “earring” searches of tags falls under the category of “more exclusive when it comes to long search terms.”
That doesn’t seem very intuitive.
May 22, 2007 at 2:21 pm · Filed under Bugs, Etsy Communications · By www.bathinginluxury.com aka Soap
A few AOL-users posted recently about emails to AOL addresses bouncing where etsy.com is mentioned in the email, even as a signature (here’s another thread mentioning this). Etsy is now aware of the issue:
RevolvingDork says:
It appears that etsy.com URLs have been blacklisted from AOL’s email service, causing AOL users to be unable to receive some automatic email from us.
The good news: We’re in contact with AOL, and have begun the process of getting off of their blacklist.
The bad news: Past experience with AOL leads us to believe that this process may take around two weeks to complete.
If you use an AOL email address with Etsy, we suggest that you log in frequently to ensure that you don’t miss any conversations or sales notification.
We apologize for the inconvenience — we’ll update you when there is further news on the matter.
Posted at 2:12 pm, May 22 2007 EST
Next entries »
