Hey folks — I’m bringing Zooomr down for 30 minutes or so to update some code I’ve been working on and to update some server settings. 
Thanks,
-Kristopher
UPDATE (1:17a PT): All Services Nominal and Maintained
Hey friends, I’ve just reset our monthly upload limit for December, but I wanted to ask a favour from everyone:
Everyone, I thank you. To everyone who posts, uploads, comments and interacts — thank you from the bottom of my heart.
This year has been an insightful & emotional one. So please, let’s not stop here — let’s do it right by finishing off the year in style!
I’m polishing Mark III right now to excel beyond photo sharing, into a place where we can truly share the experience of life and those around us. Throughout the year, I have taken the ideas that I founded Zooomr upon, even those similar to the ones above, and pushed the envelope on how we interact with photos themselves today — Solutions from audio annotation clear through to portals and even pioneering new ways to interact with photos on maps, highlighting your own journeys through life itself.
Friends around the world, please help me realize the broadest release of Zooomr yet into the world as your own. Help people see first-hand experiences from our friends in Africa, Taiwan, Estonia, India and Japan (x2 & x3).
I want to connect the world with itself — first hand, from your eyes. And, I hope that I am not alone.
I have been simply moved by the thousands of family and baby photos shared through Zooomr. Especially the first hand experiences from places like the streets of Lima, Peru.
Friends, you have already done me a pleasure that many do not get to experience: I have been able to see the world through the world’s eyes — your eyes. Now, please help me share this wonderful experience with the world over, as well.
I hope that Mark III will empower you to do the same that you have so graciously shared with me.
Thank you and season’s greetings,
-Kristopher
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.
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.
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
Hey Everyone, I’ve been here on the scene for quite some time and I’m currently working hard to restore services — here’s a brief look into where I am. Thanks for your understanding.
With love,
-Kristopher
Hey Everyone, our email gateway will be down from now until 23:45 PDT (GMT-7) — Otherwise, I’m going to be up in Seattle from tomorrow until Thursday morning — If you care to meet-up tomorrow, please let me know in the comments!
With love,
-Kristopher