Official Zooomr Blog

9:26a.m., Updated, ok, that went faster than expected, thankfully, we are back up and online and things should be a little smoother the rest of the day. Thanks all for the patience.

We are going to take Zooomr down for about an hour while Kristopher makes a few changes to our system in order to address the load demand that we are having on our servers which was causing some of the photos not to show earlier this morning. The demand on our servers has been incredibly high, especially with more and more traffic coming in from China and Taiwan due to our new translations there.

Sorry about the inconvenienec and we will report back as soon as we are back online. We added one server yesterday and hopefully will add another later today in order to better address the traffic that Zooomr is generating. Thanks again for bearing with us.

Update: Everything should be fine now. The photos not showing was just a minor tracker error that was easily fixed. We hope to have a 5th server up and online later today and hopefully things go much smoother from there. Sorry for the inconvenience this morning.

Last night we took the system down just briefly to both upgrade our network as well as add another server and more storage online. It seems this morning that photos aren’t showing correctly. We are aware of this and are looking into it and will report back when we know more.

Thanks.

Hey Everyone, I’m back at our colo adding more servers, storage and subsequently more networking to handle the new goodies. So, I might have to disconnect some boxes and add them to the new network here… Starting at 17:30 PDT (GMT-8) we will be going offline for approximately an hour at most.

With love,

-Kristopher

UPDATE 17:37 PDT (GMT-8): Great news, Everyone! Only 7 minutes instead of one hour! Haha, cool.

Zooomr-T Hosted on Zooomr

Hey! Thanks to Jordan for making this fantastic I camera Zooomr shirt. Very cool man!

Highlights:

• Kris has a new desk location at the ZooomrHQ
• Kris talks about Zooomr’s new Chinese localizations
• Kris shows an article of himself in .NET Magazine

Hey Everyone, as you may know we pushed a HUGE update yesterday for our friends in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau with Traditional Chinese support.

Well today, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve just pushed some updates to our Chinese Simplified locale — New strings and some fixes have been made, so check them out.

Blowing up in Taiwan Hosted on Zooomr

Well, it must have had a major affect because we’re seeing a HUGE spike from our Taiwanese friends from the past 24 hours.

So, thanks for visiting, Everyone — it really means a lot.

-Kristopher

So, I’ve been up for almost 72 hours now and I’m not done yet! Courtesy of Zooomr User Gem, Zooomr is now available in Chinese Traditional which brings our language count up to 18!

ALSO, in order to fit the new languages, I cleaned-up the footer element on each page. I think it looks much cleaner.

If you speak a language that you would like to see on Zooomr, hit us up on zfeedback( at )bbridgetech.com — we’re here for you!

Enjoy it my friends,

-Kristopher

Thanks to all of you for bearing with us over what has been a hellish past few days. On Thursday evening we had a massive hardware failure that took our photo storage system offline. As soon as we were aware of the failure Kristopher went down to our server farm where he has been living since.

Sometimes things are hard when you are small and with only two of us these past few days have been even harder. We are terribly sorry to all of you for having had Zooomr offline. Terribly, terribly sorry.

We are back online but we are working on our most recent backup from a few days before we went down.

We had multiple hard drives go down on one of our servers similtaneously because our RAID controller did not function as it should. Everything on Zooomr should be as it was the few days before we went down but photos uploaded in the past few days will still need to be extracted from our damaged drives. We are working with forensic specialists to try and get these drives recovered as soon as possible, but if you are not seeing photos from the immediate few days before we went down you may wish to just reupload these photos. We hopefully will have the shots from the few days prior to our failure up as quickly as we can pending the drive recoveries.

We purchased more drives and hardware over the weekend to do even more frequent backups of all of our data and again apologize and deeply regret the inconvenience that this has caused you our users. This has been the worst 72 hours of our life. More than anything we want Zooomr to be the best photosharing site in the world for you our users.

Thank you to all of you who left us supportive comments and remarks over the past few days, it has really meant alot.

Kristopher is pretty tired — both physically as well as drained emotionally from being up most of the past 72 hours working on this. He’ s going to get some sleep tonight and hopefully we will be able to give you more updates in the coming week. Should you have any specific concerns or questions feel free to email me directly at tom(at)bbridgetech.com.

Hey Folks, almost back — static.zooomr.com will come online first and then shortly after, the main site!

-Kristopher

UPDATE [28-10-2006@11:00PDT]: Static services HAVE JUST BEEN RETURNED! Wow I’m tired! (This means that blog posts that have images hosted on zooomr will now be available.)

UPDATE 2 [28-10-2006@18:57PDT]: The main site will be back online by the end of the day — I’ve been doing some intensive checks for photo data integrity.

A quick update — some of our hardware died and since stores are finally open here in the states, I bought and replaced much of the problem earlier in the day. As of right now, I’m restoring from where we left off!

We’ve still got quite a bit of files to transfer and the like, so please bear with us.

With love,

-Kristopher