Throughout parts of Sunday, November 9, and most of Monday, November 10, we experienced downtime on webscribble.com. For that, we apologize. This was an unusual event that resulted from a failed hard drive.
On Sunday we began seeing error messages on the main webscribble.com server indicating that some hardware may have been going bad. We immediately began transferring files to a new server. Unfortunately, the hard drive failure degraded quickly and we began to experience downtime while transferring files. It ultimately caused so many problems that our entire web server went down.
Luckily, we had a backup of all our files so it was just a matter of transferring them all. We finished transferring the files on Monday and simply waited for the DNS to propagate to the new server which took several hours. While we’re still working on fixing a few lingering issues, the majority of our site is back up and operational.
Again, we apologize for the unexpected downtime and any inconvenience while you tried to access our site yesterday. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
Are you looking to start a job board site, but don’t have the money to buy our job board software? Well, we have an offer that’s hard to refuse!
We are looking to get translations of our product in as many languages as possible. Currently, we have Portuguese and English. Simply translate the entire product, send us the translation files (which we’ll provide), and you’ll receive a free copy of our job board software with all plugins. You must be a native speaker of the language you’re translating to in order to participate.
Interested? Contact us, and we’ll set up the details.
We’re proud to announce that we’ve been featured in a newly released book titled The Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing on the Web: How to Use and Profit from Affiliate Marketing Programs!. The book features our software as well as an extensive interview with the author. We’ve read through it and it looks like a great resource for helping promote your website. Check it out on Amazon.
To help people with upgrades, customization, and other questions we decided to put up a community where everyone can participate. This will be a great place to trade themes, modifications, and other changes fellow customers have made to their sites. Any customer with an active support plan can post and reply to threads. Absolutely anyone can view the forum!
If you’d like to post something, you can create your account in the members area. Just create your username immediately after logging in at the bottom of the page:
We’re excited to announce the release of webNetwork 3.0! Below are some of the features we’ve included in the new release:
- Activity feeds
See what your friends are doing on the site. Similar to Facebook’s feeds where members see when their friend post new pictures, wall posts, etc.
- Status feature
Lets members post what they are currently doing, and show it in their profile
- Integration with Joomla CMS
Allows webNetwork to run as a component inside Joomla
- Multiple file uploader
Members now have the ability to upload more than one photo at a time
- New theme system
Allows you to easily create and share themes with other customers, and select from themes provided by us
- New theme
New theme called Clean Blue added in addition to the orange one that comes standard
- New WYSIWYG editor
Better HTML support so there are less problems while editing
- Birthday WebBox
Allows users to see which of their friends have an upcoming birthday
- RSS feeds
Added for individual blogs and events
- Significant code optimizations
Critical pages now run much faster (some as much as 30 times)!
- Software updates
Can now be done seamlessly right through the admin area! You will automatically be notified when there’s a new version or patch, and download it right through the software
- vBulletin
Integration with vBulletin released for the Forum plugin
- phpBB3
Integration with phpBB3 released for the Forum plugin
If you’re an existing customer, you can download your free update by logging into the members area. If you’ve been waiting to purchase the new release, buy it today!
We’re excited to announce that webNetwork 3.0 is close to completion. In the final stages prior to release, we will be doing thorough bug testing to make sure everything runs smoothly when you install it. If you’re curious about all of the new features, or would like to help, please browse over to the demo. If you notice any problems, please submit a comment in this blog post. Otherwise, tell us what you think!
Recently, a Trojan virus coined “Gumblar” has been spreading throughout the Internet. It works by injecting an exploit into the HTML code of a website, and downloads a program which is automatically installed on your computer (and thus infecting it with the virus). The program will then sniff out for FTP passwords that are entered, and log into those FTP accounts to infect your site with the same HTML exploit. Any users who visit your site will also be infected with this same virus, and their FTP passwords captured. Because of this vicious cycle, millions of websites have been infected.
Some of our customers have experienced the problem, and we have been fixing it as quickly as we can. The first thing you must do is scan your own computer to remove the Trojan. Then, you should change your FTP password, and begin to remove the infected code/files. A more comprehensive guide can be found at: http://www.danielansari.com/wordpress/2009/05/automatic-removal-of-gumblarmartuz-trojan/ and general Q&A can be found at: http://blog.scansafe.com/journal/2009/5/14/gumblar-qa.html
Please contact us with any questions.
Keep up with what’s going on in our company on Twitter @webscribble.
On Saturday, May 31, a transformer exploded at the H1 datacenter at The Planet, where some of our servers are located. The explosion caused a fire, which required all backup generators to be shut down and servers to be taken offline. While The Planet has generally been a very reliable company to deal with, this has been an unfortunate situation, which has caused some of our customers downtime including our own web site.
Over Sunday night The Planet staff regenerated power to the second floor of the datacenter, bringing one of the servers back online. Unfortunately, the server on which webscribble.com is hosted on is located on the first floor and did not get power back as quickly because of extensive damage to power lines. On Monday evening, The Planet restored power to the first floor using backup generators, but they became overloaded later that evening and our server once again lost power. On Tuesday afternoon, our server was physically transferred to another datacenter and we were able to get our web site and helpdesk back up online this morning shortly after 11 AM EST.
We sincerely apologize for the unexpected downtimes we’ve had and are taking measures to prevent this from happening in the future. If you’ve submitted tickets since Saturday and did not get an e-mail confirming that we received your request, please resend it. We’ll be working hard to catch up on your requests and answer all of your questions.
We’ve received frequent requests from customers on how to promote their site and if we could help. We didn’t have the resources at the time to undertake website promotion – until now.
I am happy to announce that our newest service for Search Engine Promotion/Optimization has launched. We’ve started off slow with a few clients, and the initial results have been extremely positive. We’ll be putting up case studies in the future to showcase the success. In the meantime, the results we’ve achieved for our own site speak to our abilities. We rank in the top 10 search results for all of our targeted keywords, and many of those rank in the top 3.
We’re excited to offer this new service to our customers. From our experience, the cost of search engine promotion and optimization is orders of magnitude less than you would be spending on advertising campaigns through Google Adwords, banner ads, or other pay-per-click services. We’re confident that we can improve your ranks in the search engine, and drive more traffic to your website.
For more information, please check out our consulting page.
