I mentioned on Tuesday that I spent Sunday putting three jewelry pieces in the Etsy shop, and that things didn’t go so smoothly. That’s something of an understatement.
You see, in the process of trying to make these lovely chains available to the world, I blew up a router and a server. Actually, I’m sure I’ve been exonerated on both counts now, but…
The chains had already been scanned and cleaned up when I sat down to work Sunday afternoon. I moved them off the other computer onto this one, and uploaded them all to Flickr. That was perhaps the easiest part of the afternoon. The pictures uploaded, and I wrote great labels for them. Then I focused my attention on the Etsy tab.
I started trying to list the first chain. Everything went fine until I got to uploading the images. Etsy repeatedly told me my images didn’t exist or weren’t the right size. Realizing I hadn’t actully thought to check file sizes, I started investigating. All but one of the images was the proper size. Snarling, I set about to upload one set of pictures again. This time, I was successful. I posted the chain, linked it to its Flickr photo, and started on the second.
This is where it all fell apart. When I got to the uploading page, I only tried to upload the images that were the correct size, figuring I could fix the third later and edit the listing. It was a moot point. Etsy adamantly refused to let me upload anything. I was thinking about crying…and then the Gmail notifier informed me there was no network connection.
Okay…fine… I’m a big girl. The network had been flaky all day. I was okay with this. My roommate would fix it when he got home, and life would be happy. So, I went ahead and resized the overly big file to make it smaller so it would be ready when the web came back. Then I sat down to read my manga magazine. (All of my non-network work had been finished earlier that day.)
I was just debating working on the outline for my NaNovel when my other roommate came in and announced that the network was up. (This is maybe three hours after it went down.) I jumped back to my laptop, excited that I was going to be able to get everything done…only to find that right as our router died, Etsy’s servers crashed.
Yes, I blew up a router and a server. I’m proud, really.
It took another hour or so for the server to come back up, and from there it was fifteen minutes of work uploading, writing copy, and linking to Flickr.
I had to wait four hours to do fifteen minutes’ worth of work.
And somehow, I wouldn’t give up my web storefront for the world!
