We've (virtually) moved everything!

As you can see in the picture to the left, we had our cabinet at our ISP pretty well full. In fact, there were 2 switches and a T-1 router on the back of that yet that you couldn't see in the picture, and we had one device pulled for maintenance. Since our customers haven't shown any sign of wanting to use our site less, and we're constantly finding new customers, we knew it was only a matter of time before the space we were using wasn't adequate. We want to stay ahead of the curve and make sure our users are getting the best experience possible, so we have made a move across town.

To the right, you can see our equipment at our new datacenter - some upgraded, some new, and all ready to serve you. We've got 4 more machines to install yet, but we have nothing left at the old facility.

If you spot any problems, let us know. We had a few minor hiccups along the way, but everything should be back to business as usual now and no orders were lost in the process. That was goal #1, and it was achieved. We now have well over three times as much space available, so we can continue to add machines to keep up with the traffic spikes during peak periods and keep the best website experience available to our amazing customers.

Keep up with us on Twitter

ToolBarn.com has a presence on Twitter now. You can keep up with new products and the latest articles by following us. If there is something else you'd like to have us send via twitter, please feel free to let us know in the comments on this blog post.

Oh, I almost forgot to link to our twitter page at http://www.twitter.com/toolbarn. We'll probably have a few contests coming out via twitter, too.

Third Party Errors

Yesterday, 4/2/08, we had a third party begin a test that affected some of our customers. This was specifically in the checkout portion of ToolBarn.com and created problems placing orders for a small percentage of visitors between 3:15pm and 6:15pm central time.

We would like to apologize for any inconvenience this caused and assure you that we are doing everything we can to ensure this does not happen again and this is not a normal occurrence. Unfortunately, the tests we were running are controlled by a third party and we had no control over fixing this.

Direct from the party involved:

...the bug itself originated at one point in our code where we've used a hard-coded URL by mistake.

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and are taking all necessary steps to ensure this does not happen again.

Skywalker Stilts

Go ahead, throw the Darth Vader jokes out there. Yes, they're called Skywalker. Still, they have nothing to do with Luke or any Death Stars, at least that we know of.

We recently took a pair of Marshalltown Skywalkers out of the box and had one of our programmers try them out. He had walked on the old fashioned wooden stilts with the handles before, but never drywalling stilts, so we made sure his life insurance was paid up and headed outside.

Once out there, he fumbled a bit on the first stilt while trying to figure out how the straps worked. By the second one, he was getting better. You can see that one on the video below, as well as some of his first steps on the stilts. He said that the more naturally he tried to walk the easier it was, and the spring loaded "feet" actually made a huge difference even though he didn't expect them to. Overall, he really liked them.

I'll let you watch the video and see for yourself. Also, this is our first product video, so let me know if there are any issues with the flash player we created or with the bandwidth available for streaming the file.



After a bit of walking on a level surface (the grass didn't work so well), he was starting to get the hang of it already. Still, I think he's more valuable working on our website than drywalling. After all, it's guys like him that make it possible for you to watch the video and get cool tool related products.

Drill Selectors

We've been working on a drill selector for some time now. As AJAX programming becomes more mainstream, we went ahead and developed this using that technology. The result has received positive reviews so far.

For cordless drills, you can try the cordless drill selector.

For electric, you can try the electric drill selector.

Any feedback is welcome, as well as suggestions for what selector you'd like to see built next. The technology was built flexible enough to handle just about anything we want to throw at it - I just need to figure out where to go next.

Limited Time Only - Penny Shipping

For the end of December and the month of January, we're offering penny shipping on all orders over $99 and totaling under 75 lbs. Depending on how this program goes, the end date could be sooner or it could be later. We'll just have to see how it goes, but for the meantime, enjoy this year-end special from your friends at ToolBarn.com.

Coming Soon - A Faster ToolBarn

We've heard the complaints about our site being slow at times. We're stepping up to the plate and upgrading the web servers and the database backend to try and make this less of a problem. We're buying more than we need to handle future growth and have everything planned so we can expand upon the technology as our needs grow. What's that entail? Lots.

1) Load Balancers
If you are interested in learning a bit about them, you can read a bit here. They're not exactly power tools, but they are powerful and are tools for making our site highly available.

2) Web Servers
We're upgrading from a single web server to 3. If you'd like to know some of the specs (for the geeky types out there), I've spelled it out here. ...started (our blogs are moved and testing more right now)...

3) Database Servers
Again, we're going from a single server to 2 with clustering. Specifics on the hardware can be found here.

4) Mail Servers
Since email is a necessary evil in doing business online, we're moving it from our web server to a dedicated machine with fail-over. Sorry, no specifics here.

5) Switches
Connecting all of these will be interesting. We ordered 2 Dell Gigabit managed switches to handle the connections - 1 for each NIC on most of these machines.

We'll be hooking all this up into different power grids with flywheel backup, and no piece of equipment will be without a backup / redundant machine. Of course, we also have our Google Mini for our search results, so we'll have 9 servers in our cabinet when it's all said and done. All this because someone said it took too long for a page to come up. I love technology. :-)

Easter is approaching

As Easter is approaching, I was reminded of some of the easter eggs we have embedded in the search on our site. As products get added, we have a sense of humor and add in a few silly terms. So, we're going to have an easter egg hunt right here on my blog. I'll give a couple of examples to start things out.

Red R2 Unit
another example

These are, of course, just silly searches that we figured would amuse people if they stumbled across them. There are plenty of other examples, but it'll take some creativity on your part to uncover them. Go ahead and see what you can locate, then leave a comment here with your findings. We have one that has been identified as the grand prize winner, which is an all expense paid trip to... Matt tells me that's not in the budget, so I guess it'll be some colorful "Easter-Eggish" ToolBarn.com Stress Balls. Just make sure you're using a registered account (free to set up through blogger.com) and have an IM contact in your profile if you want to be eligible.

Go ahead and get started with the form below:

Oh, and contest runs until the end of April, 2006 and is open to all legal US residents, blah blah blah, yada yada yada. Since the prize isn't worth 1000's of dollars, we'll mail them wherever you like addressed to whomever you like, even Fido. Just make sure you use a registered account so we can track who the winner is, which will be first one to find our "specially selected" easter egg. Good luck and happy searching.

Closed for moving 3/23/2006 - 3/26/2006

I won't be posting the rest of this week as we move buildings. The one we currently occupy has served it's purpose, but we've just flat outgrown it and are bordered by other buildings on two sides, railroad tracks to the North, and a cliff to the east. The new one has a 6 acre lot with 4 of it available for additional growth as we need it. We'll also be along a busy street instead of tucked away in a corner, which should help our walk-in traffic substantially.

As you can see, we're not moving all that far. We're moving from 6620 F St to 7820 L St. It's only 1.07 miles between buildings according to my GPS. (Sorry for the sloppy drawing... I don't have PhotoShop at home and I'm not totally used to Gimp yet.)

The picture to the right was taken a while ago while the building was being re-assembled. There were literally iron beams and a foundation left when we were done pulling stuff off that we weren't going to re-use.

Consequently, this move means if you place an order after about noon on Wednesday the 22nd of March, the earliest it'll be processed is next Monday. We intend to be fully open and ready for business at the new location then. Our phones will not be answered Thursday through Sunday, nor will emails (unless we're way ahead of schedule, which the snow storm we had has pretty much ruled out.) With any luck, everything will be back to "Normal" next week with very few glitches along the way.

Wish us luck, and thanks to all of our customers for making this move not only possible, but necessary.
Brian, Matt and the rest of the ToolBarn.com staff.

Request for feedback

I spent much of today working on the results pages for our internal search engine on ToolBarn.com to make the results easier to look at and pick out the right one. Now, I'm looking for some feedback from you, our valued site visitor.

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Example 1: Search for dewalt 18v drill

The above image is our old search results. You can see that only the product had an image, the rest were just textual listings like google would show. Below, we added thumbnails to many of the different pages, allowing you to see which pages are brand specific rather easily. Any "Category" level page has a thumbnail of the page that is linked to. Does that help you as much as it helped me to pick out the results I wanted?

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Example 2 : Search for 2610321608

Above is the old results. Again, just textual for most of the results. Below has the thumbnail of what the schematic pages look like. Does this help at all?

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Ok, so now that you've seen some of the additions I made (this is a lot of thumbnails to generate, by the way), what suggestions do you have to make our search results easier to spot what you're looking for? Most sites don't give their visitors the opportunity to give input like this, so this is your chance to make a difference. Crazy ideas accepted as well as really good ones. Just leave a comment or email me and I'll do what I can to include all the good ones on our site.