Archive for November, 2005

Banner advertising

Saturday, November 26th, 2005

Just wanted to let you know, you can now have your banner shown at the top of the HC calendar page for $5/month. If you’re interested, just sign up here:

http://hyenacart.com/BannerManage/

After you create your account, you can deposit Paypal funds and upload your banner. Let me know if you have any questions.

If you’re curious, here are some stats for the current banners:

http://hyenacart.com/BannerManage/bannerstats.php

On a typical day, the calendar page gets 1500+ hits per day. Banners need to be 468×60 pixels.

Upload images to HC server!!

Monday, November 21st, 2005

A lot of you have asked for it, and I’ve finally gotten around to adding it. You can now upload your images directly from your hard drive to the HC server. I’ve been testing it this afternoon and it makes stocking a heckuva lot easier.

Here’s how it works: first you create your item listing (just leave the images at the defaults at first). Then, once the listing is created, you click to edit it. There will be a new link underneath where the images are entered called “Upload images directly to server.” Clicking that link will take you to a page that will allow you to browse your hard drive, click the files you’d like to upload, and send them to the server. They’ll automatically be resized so that the thumbnail is 100 pixels wide, and the product images are a max of 512 wide or 750 high (whichever is larger). Once those are set, you return back to your listing where the image paths are already filled in for you. Then you enter the information for the listing as you normally do and voila! the images are in your listing.

As of now, only jpg files are supported. I’m hoping that’s what most of you use anyway. If there’s a need, I can see what I need to do to allow gifs.

You can still enter full url paths to images hosted in other locations if you want. That part works exactly as before.

This service is completely optional and costs $2.50 extra per month for single storefronts, $12.50 per month for congos. If you’d like to try it out, just send me an email with your request and your business name. I’ll get you set up. If your account is paid up, you’ll be able to use the service for the rest of your paid time at no cost (1 month max). After that, the new charges kick in unless you email me and ask me to downgrade your service (you can do that at anytime, but as usual, I can’t prorate payments that have already been made).

Thanks everyone!

OMG — that was waaayyy too easy…

Wednesday, November 16th, 2005

It’s done! We’re upgraded. It was really that easy. I am shocked!! Sorry for all the emails today. I really anticipated that this would be much more complicated than it was. Please let me know if anything acts / looks weird in the next few days.

Submitted the request…

Wednesday, November 16th, 2005

OK — I submitted the upgrade request. I am hoping this goes as smoothly as possible. If we are down for more than a day, I will bump out everyone’s paid date by the amount of downtime. I just backed up the database one last time, so changes up until a few minutes ago are saved.

Heads up! HC server upgrade coming soon…

Wednesday, November 16th, 2005

I’ve put this off as long as possible, but it’s time to upgrade my hosting package to accomodate HC’s growth. I have hesitated on doing this because while I’m happy with my host overall, I’ve heard some scary stories about difficulties when upgrading. Most likely, we’ll have some downtime, but I won’t know when or how long it will be. I haven’t put the request in yet, but will probably do so in the next few days. I’ll let you know if I find out more info on what exactly will happen during the upgrade. Most likely, the HC database will be deleted. I’ll be backing it up (as I always do), every evening. That does mean, though, that if you add some items or have a sale go through between backups, this information might be lost. I’m apologizing ahead of time for this. The other alternative is to shut down HC now, until I know for sure the upgrade has gone through, but I don’t want to do that because I don’t know if it will be a day or a week between my request and the actual upgrade. If anyone has any suggestions or requests to make this smoother, please let me know. Like I said, I haven’t put the request in yet, so anything you add / change in the database today will be backed up. I emailed my host and asked how long it would take, but as expected, I haven’t heard back. I will let you all know exactly when I request the upgrade so you can know not to plan any huge stockings in those next few days.

Thanks everyone for your understanding. I’m hoping this upgrade will fix the dropped email problems, and the increased storage space will make it possible for me to host your images directly on the HC server. I’ll be working on that code next week. The charge will be an extra $2.50 per month, if you’re interested (it will be optional).

Just a quickie…

Thursday, November 3rd, 2005

I changed the code so that your vendor pages all have a white background rather than whatever you have it set as in your store. As everyone gets into customizing their stores, some people were starting to have trouble reading the text on the stocking pages. Hope this works out for everyone. Let me know if you notice any weird issues related to the change.

More things are coming, I just have to find the time to get to them (I know you all know how that is ;) ).