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Site News and Events

Information about changes being made to the site such as upgrades to the pages, additions in functionality and changes to how things work. We will also post information about planned outages if needed.

Full site upgrade
          

We are upgrading some core functions across the entire website.

Power was out again
          

A wind storm took the power out again but only for a few hours.

Winter storm took us off-line
          

Due to an ice storm, our county experienced wide spread power and internet loss.

Our Privacy Policy
          

How do we use your personal information or the data you enter into our system?

We just added BUILD SCRIPTS to our data download!
          

People have mentioned that they had some issues in creating the tables needed to import the data. We added build scripts to the data downloads that should make that easier if you are using MySQL, MS SQL Server or Oracle.

We have upgraded!
          

The site has been updating over the past few months and now we are done with the big upgrade!

Power outage 11/24/2013
          

Our area was hit by a power outage in the evening on 11/24/2013. Our systems safely shut down before the battery backup ran out. When the power was restored, we received our alert and were able to power on all of the systems in sequence without any issue. Sorry for the interuption in service but it was beyond our control.

We are almost ready for a big change
          

Over the past few months, we have been making some very big changes to the site. You have already seen some of the cosmetic changes but the bulk of the changes have been behind the scenes.

We got a face lift
          

We spent some time to give the site a face lift. We are working on a lot of changes in the background to improve your experience and some user interface changes come with that.

We have an Android mobile app!
          

We have created an Android mobile app to make accessing the site easier from your mobile devices. For more information, visit the mobile app blog.

More data, more details, more power
          

For a couple months, we have been working on a major revamp of the database. All the existing data will be saved of course but many new data elements will be created.

Data layout is going to change
          

We just finished a big hardware upgrade and then a minor sofware upgrade. Now we are looking at revamping the data layout to make this site more robust and useful to everyone.

Hardware upgrades are finished
          

Thank you all for your patence and understanding during the last several weeks as we added new equipment to the web site. We are all finished with the hardware portion of the upgrade.

Upgrades never seem to go as planned
          

Well heck! We had another upgrade of hardware today and the process simply took far longer than expected. Sorry!

We have a new database
          

This weekend was a long one. We installed a new database server and copied all the data from the old server to the new one.

Internet issues beyond our control
          

Sorry folks for the slow and spotty service to our site yesterday (1/10/2013). There was work being done in the area and it caused general service interuptions.

Google is amazing (and frustrating)
          

This is just a general comment to those that might be interested in some technical info about our site and how Google interacts with it.

We just made updating products easier
          

Over the past couple weeks we have gone through and updated the way you can help us keep the site up to date. If you are a registered memeber of the site, you can help and earn lookup credits by validating products and putting things in the right category.

Big changes just came online!
          

We upgraded the database quite a bit. We are doing a better job of locating data around the web and for the most part. We have added links from one product to similar products to help you find what you are looking for.

Changes are still coming
          

We just completed a major upgrade to the backend with a minor face lift to the web site. More changes are coming soon!

Our site and Google AdSense
          

Like so many sites, we use AdSense to generate income through this web site. And some of the things we do are to make sure we stay in compliance with the AdSense policies.

We are upgrading the evening of 10/5/2012
          

We will be offline from about 8pm Pacific time on 10/5/2012 and expect to be back online by 6am on 10/6/2012. UPDATE: The upgrade completed at 7:30am.

GoDaddy was attacked by Anonymous!
          

We are not hosted at GoDaddy, but we are registered there and have our DSN settings stored with them. So when Anonymous attacked GoDaddy, we were impacted too.

Now that the dust has settled...
          

If you read earlier articles you will know that we had to do a major hardware rebuild and restore from backups. Well we have gotten everything back up and it all seem stable so we are moving on to work on the upgrade again.

We have a 99.5% up time track record
          

Although we have had a couple days lately when we have been down for maintenance, looking back over the last couple years we can say that we have been available 99.5% of the time and that isn't too bad at all.

When it rains, it pours. We were down again!
          

This time it wasn't our fault. There were power issues due to a substation down the street catching fire. We don't know the details of how it happened. But we do know that there were a lot of surges and some made it through our UPS to take out our main server.

We are upgrading the way company data is handled
          

Due to changes in how codes are sold, we have decided to abandon the old method for associating products to companies and try something new. This change will make it easier to enter corrections for company data as well as making it easier for companies to manage their own product collection.

The download page has been updated!
          

As our site has grown, we have gotten more requests for data and image downloads. When we were small we handled these by hand and then later added a little automation. Now we have cleaned it up and made it easier to use.

We were down for maintenance
          

You  may have noticed that we were off line for a while here and there over the past couple days.