The Robot Co-op

Due to a misconfiguration with our database we had some unplanned downtime. Everything is good again but we’ll need to have another short downtime sometime soon to fix it for good.

Yahoo! has been making the news as of late with its acquisitions of all the great Web 2.0 newness. First there was Flickr, then upcoming.org, then del.icio.us, and now… no, not the Robot Co-op. Instead, we decided to pull a switcheroo and acquire something of our own, and we did right under Yahoo!’s nose.

Laboring away in Yahoo’s Dallas office was Erik Benson’s one time SXSW roommate, Bill Turner. Bill had built a great site called “Lists of Bests” and we liked it a lot! So in our bid for Web 2.0 grandeur, we’ve gone on our own acquisition spree, first buying Erik Benson’s All Consuming, and now Bill Turner’s Lists of Bests. You can read Bill’s blog post about all this on his blog.

We think they’ll make beautiful music together (along with our other sites) and we are excited to share new versions of them with you soon.

We are hard at work integrating these new sites in to the 43 Things world and adding some new Robot Co-op signature features. If you are interested in helping test the new sites, or want to be notified when they launch, head over to Lists of Bests and sign up. And congratulations, Bill Turner! Thanks for creating Lists of Bests.

Tonight I’ll be changing the way images are stored on our sites around 11PM Pacific Time.

While I’m working on the images you may notice some missing images or image uploading not working for a few minutes.

Currently we store all our images on one disk, but it is close to being full (about 20 days of space remain). I’ll be switching to mogilefs for storing our images which allows us to distribute the disk usage across multiple servers.

UPDATE: It looks like I’ve got all the problems straightened out. There are a few images that aren’t yet in mogilefs but those will be found and imported over the next couple hours.

UPDATE: The image import crashed while trying to import the last of the missing profile images last night so a few of you may have missing profile images. I restarted the importer and its running through all ~800,000 images again.

Also, for those of you that have wrong profile images it will be very helpful if you give me a link to the image that is incorrect. To do this go to your profile images page. Mine is:

http://www.43things.com/profile_images/view/drbrain

Then get the image address. It should be a URL like this:

http://images.43things.com/profile/00/00/f8/63703pw400.jpg

Then I can go track down why the proper image isn’t showing.

UPDATE: I’ve fixed the random-image-fun, but some profile images might still be missing. The profile images import is about 3/8 done.

UPDATE: Consuming images are all fixed, random images seem to be all gone, but there’s a bunch of incorrect images that I’ll be flushing out starting now. Thanks for your patience!