I'm finalizing a new verion to be released very soon.  The update will contain a few bug fixes, a bunch of new features, and an exciting announcement about a new website. 

The plan is to release this version with our new VPS hosting company, which is a significant upgrade from our current setup and will allow us to grow in some exciting new ways.

If you didn't notice NotifyWire suffered a long outage for almost 24 hours.  My hosting company's server blew up and they had problems with their backup.  It looks like things are running again, but I'm still testing.  I've already created an account with a new VPS hosting company that should give me the flexibility I need for future development and better performance and up-time.

Also, the 1-800 number is working, but the phone it forwards to is not.  I'm working on getting a replacement, but I can't receive calls or return calls at this time.

And to top it all off, my poor dog had to go to the emergency room after she had a disk rupture and became paralyzed from the waist down.  She had surgery Saturday and is now facing a lot of rehab.  I usually have her napping right by my side for long NotifyWire coding sessions and miss her company dearly. 

March is shaping up to be a really tough month.  I'm hanging on as tight as I can and I appreciate all the support and flexibility I've been given by NotifyWire users and customers.  Thanks.

So, I was swimming the other day (getting ready for a surfing trip to Mexico) and my lung collapsed.  It’s called a spontaneous pneumothorax and it happens sometimes in tall lean men, for no apparent reason.  Not only did this keep me from my trip and in the hospital for a few days, but I wasn’t able to get much work done on NotifyWire because of it too. 

I’m mostly better now and back to work on the next release of NotifyWire.  I hope to get it out later this week, but I'm just getting caught up with where I left off, so I'm not completely sure yet.  Thanks for bearing with me.

As part of a fix to the recent monitoring problem, please make sure to download and install the latest version of NotifyWire.  The application should prompt you with the update, so please make sure to accept the upgrade so we can get back to the high frequency monitoring that we love to provide.

I have a lot of new functionality update for NotifyWire that are not in the release because they couldn't be tested in time to be pushed out with this emergency release.  They should be done within two weeks.

Last night I released a major overhaul of the Peer2Peer Craigslist monitoring service backend.  Two days prior, NotifyWire became a victim of its own success and had more users than the service could handle. 

When I built NotifyWire I didn’t go nuts planning for scalability because there was no guarantee it would be successful enough to deem it necessary.  The changes I made to the service should support 10x – 50x more users.  After that, I’ll have to do more work to scale the system, but that will be a good problem to have.

Because of the scalability issues, you might have noticed NotifyWire was running slower or having connection problems.  As well, the monitoring engine really wasn’t working well for about 48 hours while I gutted it and re-coded it.  I’m sorry I wasn’t out in front of this issue before it happened.

One more thing to note:  NotifyWire is monitoring more of Craigslist than ever before and we need your help to keep the frequency high.  Here’s what you can do:

Write a tweet about NotifyWire.

If you like NotifyWire, tell your friends on Facebook or write them an email.

And, if you really love us, you can go to download sites and rate our app, here’s some links:

VersionTracker.com (Win) (Mac)

Download.com (Win) (Mac)

Softpedia.com (Win) (Mac)

A new release is available today.  Version 3.0.8 contains a few fixes and small improvements.

• Ad alert emails are now in a better format with the ad title in the subject.  I removed most non-essential info.
• Alerts can now be replied to directly to respond to the ad poster (assuming an email address was provided somewhere in the ad).
• Ripped out the fancy NotifyWire email relay system that prevented spam because Craigslist started blocking some emails from NotifyWire.com.  The "Reply to Ad" button now launches your default mail program like any other email link would.  I'm working on a feature to allow you launch email directly to your online email (gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail, etc...).
• On the server there was a bug in the search engine that monitors craigslist.  In a few scenarios this bug prevented many alerts (but not all) from being sent.  This has been fixed on our server.

I didn't get as much in this release as I would have liked.  There were a few unexpected bugs that I had to work on instead of adding features.  Not to worry, new features are coming soon.

This clip is not safe for work or kids, but it's funny. 

Craigslist is like an abusive spouse.  The more you love it, the more it beats on you.  Today, thanks to a sharp user, I realized that Craigslist has started blocking all emails coming from NotifyWire.com.  That means the NotifyWire feature to respond to ads doesn’t work anymore, don’t use it.  Instead, click the button to open the ad in the default browser and reply to the ad as you normally would.

In hindsight, I should have seen this coming.  Despite the fact that I made this feature in an attempt to eliminate scam ads set up to auto respond to anyone who replies, Craigslist, in their infinite and infallible wisdom has decided that people are better off being subjected to this kind of spam.  Really, Craigslist should set up a similar system to mine, but…ah, crap, I don’t want to go there.

So what now?  Now I’ll make it easy to reply to ads, but you’ll have to do it with your own email address, not one shielded by NotifyWire.  It will take a few days to rebuild this in a way that works well.  I could use a “mailto” type of link that will launch your default email client…but most people use online email and don’t know how to redirect their default mail client to the online one.

I could also ask for your email credentials, but then I have to worry about encryption, etc…  Most likely, I’ll go with the “mailto” with an easy setup option to redirect to major online email accounts like gmail and yahoo mail.

And there goes 40 hours of development time down the drain.  Thanks Craigslist, may I have another.

So, I just fixed the Mac problem…for real this time.  I’m sorry I didn’t test this better on a Mac before, but I don’t have one, and frankly, I can’t afford one.  Luckily, my buddy told me the problem I was having didn’t go away.  So for the 100+ Mac users who installed NotifyWire in the last few days, I’m not sure why one of you didn’t email me with a bug report?  I didn’t think Mac users were a shy bunch…

Anyway, if you’re a Mac user and you still have NotifyWire installed it will auto update to the new working version.  If you uninstalled it because it didn’t work for you, please give it another go.  I’ve been told it really works this time.

My wife really love's those stupid Twilight books.  Too bad she already has a great job.  If you know someone who's beyond crazy about Twilight and needs a job, here you go! 

I should warn you though, this job could really suck the life out of you...sorry, couldn't resist.