Software Channels

The new servers are here! We are currently preparing the new hardware for the tradebit platform and will move everything over on the 13th of August.

Scheduled time is Wednesday 3 am EST: Remember the Simon and Garfunkel song?

In order to keep everything in sync and order, we have to switch off the old site for around 30 minutes. In that time no uploading, using, buying will be possible and we apologize for that.

We believe to have a much better setup coming you way!

And why Wednesday 3 am? Well, it is a coincidence but I like Simon and Garfunkel - so I know about that song:

If you have a lot of traffic on your pages and you want to know exactly what your users look for and how they act on your pages: there are great free tools on the market to help you with that:

Google analytics: The tracking and analysis of your site with Google Analytics is a basic requirement to find out about your traffic sources, the keywords you are listed for and what your top pages are. We use Analytics on tradebit to find out about the needs of our visitors BEFORE they reach our site: referal analytics and keyword listings.

Now much more information and typical design errors we implement while working on tradebit are NOT unveiled by the Google tool. So I looked around for a “heat map” analytics tool, which should show me, where the users click when they land on tradebit!

Heat map analytics: I found a tool which is promoted in the Drupal universe of software tools called ClickHeat from Labsmedia.

It produces a heatmap for your site like this:

which gives you a good idea of your pages performance and where to optimize conversion. It helps you and the surfer and that is a good win-win situation!

The configuration of ClickHeat is quite simple: You need to have a PHP enabled webserver and you upload and unpack the archive into your web directory. Make sure you set:

your-server/clickheat/config

your-server/clickheat/cache

your-server/clickheat/logs

as read/write enabled, because ClickHeat needs to store info in these directories.

The snippet you need to insert into your pages is provided by the web frontend of ClickHeat once you logged in. To make it work right, you may define GROUPS of pages and the domain name you want to analyze. That can be done dynamically via PHP.

You may post comments, if you are facing problems with the tool, I think I have it under control

There are also many tweaks and packages for other standard software packages out - like Tom Mollerus’ ColdFusion implementation or a package for Drupal, which is also very useful!

Today we finally found some time to improve a section of downloads I personally like a lot:

Games Downloads

Since we started to distribute games I felt that this section needs more attention regarding the download charts and more information on the games!

We have added more screen shots and information to the single games today and do also sort the Games by their popularity now. Almost all games can be downloaded as a free trial, which is pretty cool. You download the game and play it for 30-60 minutes in full mode - then you decide if you want to buy it. The payment is integrated into the game and leads you directly to our Paypal pages. Free trials = fair deal! You know what you get! But be warned - some are very addictive!

Sometimes people upload material, that infringes copyright. Some of the uploaders are not aware of their violation, some are doing that on purpose.

Here is how we handle that:

1. If we see that there is a violation, we delete the user - but only if we are 100% sure that the merchant is doing that on purpose and that the violation is also crystal clear
2. If we get a report of a copyright violation by surfers, we look into the file and try to contact the merchant if he (or she) has reseller rights
3. If we get DMCA complaints, we remove that file within 24hrs

Sometimes files slip through and we are thankful for reports. Also files with virus warnings lead to a complete delete of an account.

On Sunday, August 3rd, our hosting company ThePlanet.com will perform a data center upgrade. This time we are affected by the upgrade and that could lead to unavailable machines in that time.

The window for that was choosen well: Sunday, August 3rd between 12:01am and 5:00am. That will hurt but not too much.

I hope the outages will be minimal for that incident.

The second system note is due for our overall cluster upgrade, which will take place around a week later. At that time it could be, that we are offline for 2-3 hours. I will update you as soon as I know more.

Here is an excerpt from the customer support group:

Dear Valued Customer:
Over the past few months, The Planet’s network and technology teams have been working to upgrade all of our data centers and network connections to consolidate our network footprint into a single autonomous system (AS). To facilitate this project, we have increased the bandwidth capacity between all of our data centers, and we’ve run a second 10Gbps network connection between our Houston and Dallas locations to further improve the network’s redundancy. By uniting into one AS, our six data centers will be recognized as a single entity for Internet routing purposes. This consolidation enables us to leverage our network’s size to provide you more bandwidth at a lower cost, it gives you (as a customer) the ability to seamlessly spread your infrastructure between all of our data centers in both cities, and it allows us to route bandwidth and traffic to you in a much more efficient manner.
One of the final steps in completing this AS consolidation requires a scheduled maintenance window for our H2 data center on Sunday, August 3, 2008, between 12:01am and 5:00am. The entire data center will be migrated to our new network hardware infrastructure during the maintenance window, so our team has designed the maintenance process to minimize the impact the network changes have on your servers in H2. Your IP addresses will not change, your server will not need to be powered down, and you will not need to update anything on your servers or racks following this maintenance.

At the end of August tradebit.com should be much much faster and (even more) stable than ever before. The network will be faster and with our new (incredible fast) hardware we will have reached a milestone. My only fear is that we mess it up by upgrading… (note to myself: back-ups are my friends ).

Folks, no way to deny: we are running out of drive space. You pumped a whooping 16 Terabytes onto the system and we are 86% filled. Today I talked to ThePlanet, what we can get to solve that issue and a solution is at hand. In August we will double the cluster space to somewhere around 30 TB and streamline the backend infrastructure to increase speed and functionality.

The cluster is in planning at the moment and ThePlanet is able to provide us with some real hard core 64bit Linux boxes, each with Dual Quadcore processors and 8 GB RAM for the frontend. That should make tradebit a real joy to work with regarding speed.

Regarding usability: I also wanted to thank Jason, Lizzie, Ben and Joe for giving some valuable feedback about current feature developments and problems in the member area. We will try to implement your suggestions until the end of August.

Now I will plan the move to the new cluster, which should serve us well for 2-3 years if I put it right and scalable. In my upcoming speeches on Linux clusters that will be some additional know-how to talk about!