Weddingbee

We recently got an email from a reader who said she introduced her friend to Weddingbee… but then noticed her friend had trouble keeping track of all the bees. It’s true - it can be a bit overwhelming to come up to speed for first time readers!

So to help new users get to know the bees, we’ve whipped up a module on the front page that shows the most active bees on the site. If you click on the icon for a bee, you can easily see the posts from that blogger… and see their bio too. Hopefully, it’s a nice way to ease into the site.

We’re still working out some tweaks, but traffic is low because of the 3 day weekend in America so we thought we’d just try it out. Let us know what you think!

There have been a bunch of popular board posts recently about local brides:

• Any Colorado Brides here?  - 65 comments
• CANADIAN BRIDES TO BE (preferably in the Toronto Area!!!) - 33 comments

So we took the hint, and BIL Bee added Local Boards to Weddingbee!  Now you can post into any one of roughly 30 metro areas in the US and Canada:

We added some cities last night, and a bunch more today.  A bunch of brides have already created posts in their own cities!  You can see a clickable version of the map above on the right side of the boards page.

If you don’t see your city or metro area on the list, please request a city here!

• http://boards.weddingbee.com/topic/request-a-city

Please let us know what you think!

Hey guys - this is Mr. Bee with an update on the message boards.

Over the weekend, the boards started acting funny. After you submit a post or comment, you end up on a blank page. A lot of folks have been hitting backspace and hitting submit again… which causes a double post (or double comment).

We’ve been going through and deleting as many double posts/comments as we can. We’ve also tried a ton of different possible fixes (over 30!), but none of them have done the trick. If we can’t figure it out, we’ll have to upgrade our boards software to the latest version tonight.

Just wanted to give you guys a head’s up that we’re working on the issue! It’s a bit tricky because BIL Bee and I have day jobs, so we’re only able to work on on this in the evenings. Hopefully we can fix it in the next day or two.

Thanks for your patience guys…

Mr. Bee

Boards and Classifieds have grown like crazy, to the point where they are getting harder for us to moderate. A few of you suggested we add a Craigslist style “flag” link to help control spam… So BIL Bee went ahead and did just that!

Now, when you click our new “flag” link under any Boards post or comment, a little box pops up and you can type in the reason you think the post should be taken down.

We’ll get an email and check it out as soon as we get the chance.
Read more…

We get hundreds of spam comments a day, so we’ve installed a bunch of spam filters on the blog. One of them started going crazy this evening, and flagging everything as spam for about an hour! Mrs. Penguin pointed it out to us in chat, and we deactivated the crazy spam filter for now.

Everything should be back to normal, and comments should be going through again. Let us know if you’re seeing any problems! If your comment doesn’t go through, please try us here.

Mrs. Bee and I are becoming professional wedding attenders. We go to more than a few weddings a year, which is amazing to me because we both think of ourselves as not knowing many people! Anyway it’s humbling going to other people’s weddings, because you realize how many things you wish you could change about your own wedding. I really think that weddings are becoming a competitive sport. The bar is being raised in so many ways, many of which cost a lot of money!

If Mrs. Bee and I had gotten married after all these weddings we’ve been to in the last few years, I think we’d feel compelled to double our budget! The cool thing though is that the best things about my favorite weddings were all pretty affordable. So to hook up all those poor grooms out there, I thought I’d make a list of inexpensive or free things you can do to make your wedding special.

1. THOUGHTFULNESS

You can *really* tell when a bride and groom have planned a wedding around their guests. I think a key thing is making sure guests can easily find and get to your wedding. It’s a bunch of little things and they’re mostly cheap or free: putting a great map in your invite… putting signs on the street corners pointing to the venue… making sure there’s parking near your venue… posting signs in the lobby… basically the little things that make it easy for guests to find the place, and to settle in. I’ve been to sooo many weddings that were hard to find and people got lost! By the time the ceremony starts (usually late, because so many people got lost), everyone is already in a bad mood. A stressful start to the wedding, and hard to recover from!

Read more…

Hi everybody, it’s BIL Bee.

Sorry for the server slowness today! We’re painfully aware of the problem, which is a general problem our webhost is having. Don’t worry, the problem isn’t anything specific to Weddingbee!

I guess today’s problem is the final straw, because we’re finally going to bite the bullet and get a reliable dedicated server for Weddingbee. Actually, I just bought the server a few minutes ago, so I hope that we’ll be up and running on the new server in a few days…

Thanks for your patience!

Thanks,
BIL Bee

The site is back up!

We still don’t know exactly what happened. The site stopped working last night, and nothing had changed! BIL Bee and I called and called our web host, and they said they had to wait til morning for their techies to come in. Didn’t they realize that Weddingbee was down?!?!

Finally this morning we gave up on our webhosts and dug into the issue ourselves (i.e. started Googling). And it turned out that other Wordpress users have been having the same issue! Something about the caching engine suddenly stopping working, and throwing a “500 Internal Server Error”. So we turned off caching, and the site seems to work again?

It remains to be seen how the site will hold up without caching on. It may get slower as the day goes on. We’ve upgraded to a more expensive hosting plan, to get more database capacity while we figure out how to get caching back on. I hope the database can hold up to the traffic load today!

I’m sorry about the downtime last night. Please let us know how the site is holding up for you in your neck of the woods?

Hello my fellow Bees, this is Mr. Bee. I have to apologize for Weddingbee’s slowness and spotty uptime today. The new webhost that I picked has had great uptime for months - but then started having problems on the very day we picked to move!

We’re currently upgrading our hosting plan to a higher priced version. The upshot is that we will be on a dedicated server just for Weddingbee by the weekend, which should greatly improve our site speed. In the meantime, we’re at the mercy of the hosting company - I hope things should get better tomorrow, but can’t say for sure :-(.

I am deeply hopeful that the changes we’re making will make the site faster once and for all! Thanks for bearing with me, and my deepest apologies for the painful transition.

This is Brother in Law Bee. If you’re reading this, you’re visiting Weddingbee at its new home!

It’s been a long road. Our first host was just OK, so we moved to a second host that had great potential, but too many problems. Hopefully, our new ultra-premium webhost will be perfect and we’ll be able to concentrate on making new stuff.

Please let us know if you see any broken links or other problems!

Thanks,
Brother in Law Bee