SE Conspiracy

I don’t know if it was due to a system update or if it was hacking (i.e. my typical conspiracy), but my baby, ShrinkTheWeb, stopped generating thumbnails for about 7 hours over this weekend. I was staying up all night to prepare a proposal for review later on tonight, but I ended up working on ShrinkTheWeb until 6:30am.

I’m just glad to have fixed it. I was at my wit’s end and beginning to think I couldn’t get it, because I absolutely have to get this proposal done. But, at the last minute –shortly after Leah got up and left for work, I got it.

Getting these captured screenshots of websites to happen automatically truly is a piece of magic. It is a work of art, indeed. I was going to be upset if I didn’t get it working again, because people would be forced to switch to a lesser service, if mine wouldn’t work.

My ShrinkTheWeb Thumbnail Generator

Anyway, I have to get to my proposal and just wanted to post a quick update. Here’s a copy of the email I sent out to the faithful webmasters that currently use ShrinkTheWeb:

“On Saturday, Jan 19th (evening) until Sunday, Jan 20th (6:30am),
ShrinkTheWeb experienced an unexpected outage.

I have been up all night working on it, and although I am still
unsure as to the cause of the outage, I have gotten the system
back online and generating thumbnails once again.

All of your requests for thumbnails during the outage were still
queued, and there are about 750 thumbnails in currently in the
queue -as of this writing. They should all be cleared within an
hour or two.

I wish I could say for certain that I knew what caused this
outage and that it won’t happen again, but it seems that the
server “conveniently” updated a critical piece of system
software that exhibited different behavior after the update.

Generating these thumbnails is nothing short of magic, and even
simple updates can cause horrific problems.

In any case, I will keep an eye on things and hope this did not
cause any great inconvenience for you.

Best regards,

Brandon
-ShrinkTheWeb”

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