We are really happy with the number of guitars that were put up this week and thanks to everyone who entered them on the system. As part of that we ask for, but do not insist on a photo (or photos!) of your guitar as it makes browsing the public guitars much more enjoyable and informative for all members.

Sometime in the next week or so we will be making a change to the guitar gallery so that guitars with at least one photo are given preference.

We know that will make the user experience of the guitars much better – and may give you an incentive to take those shots and upload them

keith

Something is stopping the system from sending out an email to confirm the email address of new account registrations. That leaves an account pending and therefore unusable.

I have just manually cleared 34 pending accounts and found one which I cannot get sorted – I have contacted the individual to let them know the story.

This will hopefully be sorted on Monday

Sorry for any frustration caused to you if you were caught by this.

keith

Quick one to let you know that one of the development team reported a bug which left his account sign up incomplete – the email which is sent out to confirm his email address was not received. If you have been affected by that please accept our apologies – it will be looked at first thing Monday morning.

You can ping me in the meantime (keith AT dbtwang.com) if you want your account activated over the weekend.

keith

The first 125 invitations have just been sent out. As soon as we are comfortable that there are no deal-breaking bugs in the service we will start sending out additional batchs until everyone of the existing 996 of you are in. Should be over the next couple of weeks.

If you want to jump the queue ping me (keith AT dbtwang.com) and tell me why

keith

More to come but this gives a general overview of what dbTwang is offering in beta.

Your comments and feedback welcome

keith

The service went down overnight on Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning which is not something that we took lightly.

What appears to have happened

While you can never be 100% sure with technology the cause was that the dbTwang database software running the service was in the middle of running background tasks when we initiated an upgrade of the server package. That interrupted the tasks and caused the service to stop.

What we will do differently in future

We (being Fintan and Keith of dbTwang) will never initiate a change in the server hosting without consulting with Lunar Logic (our tech team) so we can be sure that nothing is interrupted. We will also ensure we make any changes when there are tech’s available in Lunar Logic to intervene if required.

We are really sorry about the down time. Any questions feel free to ask.

keith

Our geek crew hammered the server which hosts the dbTwang.com database and cracked the issue which was making it slow down.

While that was happening Fintan checked on a bug which he found last week to discover it had not been squashed as planned – it had caused a field of data on one of his guitars to be changed. We had to take a decision this evening to hold (again) the invite to the first 100 users until it is fixed – we absolutely cannot have guitar data being compromised once it is entered.

The team in Poland are on this first thing in the morning. Update again tomorrow.

keith

The beta launch is almost ready – we can smell it in the air here in dbTwang HQ.

The final challenge is getting the backend software configured so that the site runs quickly like it should – there is an intermittent issue with slow loading pages.

Our Tech guys in LLP are on the case and as soon as they resolve we will start to send the invites out.

Sorry for the delay and thanks for your patience.

keith