boxedup.com blog

Just a quick note on the disruption that’s happening to boxedup at the moment (as far as being able to add products with images to lists is concerned, and also impacting product images on the site generally).

It’s being caused by the outage that Amazon Web Services is currently experiencing (specifically their S3 service), which started approximately 5.5 hours ago (you can see the status of S3 and Amazon’s other web services here http://status.aws.amazon.com/).

boxedup uses S3 to host all our product images, and part of this involves sending the images to S3 when a product is added by a user to their list. Unfortunately this means that when S3 is down it currently prevents products from being added to lists (i.e. we created a dependency on them).

We’re currently working to remove that dependency, so that we aren’t reliant on S3 being available in order for products to be added to lists (so if S3 is down then we’ll just terminate that part of the process and carry on to add the product to your list, with all the other information other than the image).

The only other impact on the site is that all product images are currently appearing broken (these images will be restored when S3 becomes available again). But the site is operating fine in all other respects.

We’re sorry for the disruption to boxedup, and we’re doing everything necessary to ensure that if S3 does go down again that it can’t impact the core boxedup site.

For those of you keeping an occasional eye on the gifttagging blog you’ll know that there’s been a lack of blog activity recently (!), but that’s all about to change (and infact we’re using a new blog)! And current site users will probably have noticed the improvements that have been taking place in the last couple of weeks, meaning that the site is now faster and works better.

‘What’s going on?’, we hear you say! Well after a bit of a lull in things being done to the site we’ve now got new-found momentum, and are going to be really pushing forwards with making the site the essential tool for everybody in the world to keep track of, and get, the things that they want, to share their lists with people who want to get them stuff, and to come together to find interesting and cool stuff that other members of the gifttagging community have discovered.

And there’s more! We’ve got a new member of the team, and co-owner, onboard who’s going to be pushing the site forwards with us - Chris Osborne. Chris has got the same passion for creating a tool that will ensure that everybody gets what it is that they want, and has fun in the process. So it’s great to have him here.

We’ve got lots of plans as we hit this new phase. And we obviously want to hear from all of you too! So if you’ve got any comments, thoughts, or suggestions, or anything else that you want to share, then we’re waiting to hear from you! You can email us at letterbox [at] gifttagging.com, or you can email me at jeremy [at] gifttagging.com and Chris at chris [at] gifttagging.com.

Thanks to everybody who’s been with us on the journey so far - we hope that you’re finding the site useful and fun to use, and we’re looking forward to being with you on the next stage of the journey.

And please spread the gifttagging word!