HC Blog

Hi everyone,

I’ve managed to finish off a couple more to-do’s this week:

• Marking stores as favorites: you and your customers can now mark stores as favorites. Your favorite stores will be listed on your “My HC” page with the current number of items available and the next stocking date if it’s on the weekly calendar anywhere. The link to use is found just under the Login links on the main store pages.
• Persistent logins: as a buyer, you’ll now see a “Remember me?” checkbox on the log in page. This should allow you to log in once and then not need to re-enter your info next time you visit the site. Give it a try and let me know how it works. I don’t plan on implementing this on the vendor pages for security reasons.
• Oh, and if you’ve recently switched from Standard to Multi, your store may have reverted back. Just let me know and I’ll get it switched over again.
• Have you checked out the main page lately? Andrea of Wanted Web worked her magic again and created icons for each of the store categories

Thanks everyone!

I have started deleting images that are over 3 months old. Any images that have a path starting with http://hyenacart.com/prod_images2 will be deleted in the next 48 hours. If you have images that need to last in your store longer than 3 months, then you have a few options: 1) host these images remotely, on your own server or somewhere like Photobucket (although I think images expire there too); or 2) upload your long-standing product images to your gallery, then copy that image path to your product listing.

Note that category images and gallery images will not be deleted, only product images. I’d like to keep them all up forever but there’s just no way the server can handle all these images indefinitely.

Thanks!

Julia’s sick today, so I’m home with her, helping her lay on the couch and watch TV But it’s a good thing because I got a lot of little items knocked out today:

• I added a little blurb at the bottom of each store which tells how long you’ve been hosted on HC. Some of you oldies have been around since 2004!
• I made some modifications on HC Multi. There were a lot of errors with the cart from incorrect shipping settings (not setting unused shipping options to 999 and not setting the overall shop config shipping to 0). This was causing the checkout not to function correctly (items were not taken out of stock or shown as paid). I’ve made a few changes that will make this more intuitive. It should be more obvious what’s going on with the shipping charges now, as customers check out from your stores.
• By popular demand, customers can now shop and check out from HC Multi stores without registering for a Hyena Cart account. In addition, they can check out using a credit card or bank account transfer without having a Paypal account. Finally, you may want to look into customizing your checkout page: https://paypal.com/customize . This allows you to change the colors of the PP checkout page and add your logo at the top to make the checkout process more seamless.
• I added a Google search field to the Help pages on the main HC site. This search goes through the content of the informational pages, as well as the forums and all the shop listings. I’m hoping this will make it easier to find the answers to questions like “stocking not showing up on calendar”. Try typing that into the search field on the left here: http://hyenacart.com/more_info.php
• I added stocking times to the daily calendar and made it sortable by bizname, price and stock time: http://hyenacart.com/calendar_day.php . That should make it easier for customers to find your products
• I also added a “Most Spots” page: http://hyenacart.com/most_spots.php This really showcases some of the most beautiful products at HC Unfortunately, some of the images come out a bit distorted or pixelated. That’s because I forced them all to be the same size in order to get the formatting of the page right. If you use larger thumbnail images, that will help with that issue.

I’ve got more I’d like to tackle on President’s day, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m also in the mood for some KSS stuff, so I’m not sure what will win out

Well, things were pretty quiet this week, which was a very very good thing! I’m hoping that means the database corruption was due my messing with the server memory setting a few weeks back.

Since everything seemed stable, I went ahead and made the database changes for HC Multi that I’ve been talking about. I think most of the major things are working fine (purchasing, listing stuff, etc.) but we may find some little things that aren’t quite right. If you do notice something, please post it on this thread.

Thanks again for your patience the past few weeks. I really appreciate it!

Well, okay then. It’s been an interesting few weeks. A few more database errors cropped up today but have been repaired. I’m not sure what the root cause of the problem is yet. I do know that last week, when the HC Multi stores were loading so slowly, I upped the amount of memory the server could access in RAM. I never changed it back and I’m hoping that is what’s causing the database errors. It is switched back now and hopefully that fixes the issue.

If it’s any consolation (and I’m pretty sure it’s not really ), I just finished reading The Perfect Store about how eBay got started and eBay used to spend a good portion of it’s time crashed out and being restarted. In fact, even after it was fairly well established, it had an outage of almost 24 hours. At least we haven’t gotten that bad yet. I will continue monitoring the situation and diagnosing the cause of these errors.

Also, this question has come up so I want to address it here: the databases are, in fact, backed up daily, so you won’t lose more than a day’s work at any given time. That didn’t help yesterday as the listings were made and lost before the backup, but at least you don’t have to worry about losing everything.

Finally, I had mentioned yesterday that I would be doing database work on the HC Multi stores. I’m going to hold off on that for a few days and just leave everything be, without changing anything, so we can get a good idea of how the server’s holding up. I’ll be sure to give you at least 24 hours notice before the downtime.

Thanks for bearing with me everyone. I appreciate your patience and understanding!

I am very sorry about the general goofiness of the server the past few weeks. It was getting slower and slower today, so I had the host re-boot the machine. This apparently caused a bunch of errors in the databases. They’re repaired now, but unfortunately, some listings and orders were lost. Added to that, the re-boot caused what I’m calling ’server barf’. A bunch of old emails that must have been lost in a buffer were sent out all at once. What I’m thinking is that I will now manually re-boot the server on a weekly basis to keep the whole thing more stable.

If you spent a significant amount of time listing items today and lost your listings, please email me at support@hyenacart.com with your store id # (the number after vid in your listing links) if you have HC Standard, or just your store name if you have HC Multi, plus how much time you lost.

Again, I’m very sorry for any of you who were inconvenienced today.

ETA ~ HC Multi users — I need to do some database stuff in the next few days. HC Multi stores will be inaccessible from about 9:30-11:00 pm Thursday night. Again, sorry about the inconvenience, but this really needs to be done.

Hi all,

So the hyenas were brutal on the server today, especially with several mega-stalked stockings this afternoon. I have asked these super-wahm’s to stagger their stocking times a bit so that only a few items (maybe 4-5) go up at once. That should help with the server load. If this continues to be a problem, we may have to upgrade servers again, but if you recall, this is not exactly a pain-free process, so we’ll hold off on it for now.

In other news, I looked more closely into Google checkout, which several of you have requested. Unfortunately, the way it’s set up now is not compatible with the way HC works, especially in regards to overselling. Hopefully they’ll change things in the future.

Finally, I just uploaded a few new changes for the HCS stores — specifically, on the vendor order history pages, the list is now filtered by date and is downloadable as a CSV file.

That’s all for now. Thanks for hosting on HC!