Thursday Thoughts: Long Weekends and Summer Fun

My favorite weekend of the year has arrived, its the Fourth of July! I love the beach, I love seeing families get together and going out and about and enjoying each others com

pany, I love eating Pizza and Hot Dogs on the sand, and getting my feet wet on the beach. I love everything about this day, because it starts with a little-know local's event call the Aptos Fourth of July Parade. The town of Aptos shuts its streets for a day of fun-filled events. First, a big pancake breakfast and then the BIG parade. Yay!

Over the years, I've collected a bunch of cool photos of the event that I put together in a collage. I can't wait until after the weekend so I can show you more!

Soooo excited to report that the DNS issue that was not allowing me to access the Etsy website has FINALLY cleared up! Is anyone else still experiencing issues?

More About the Etsy DNS Issues

Well its July 1, which marks 5 days of having trouble accessing Etsy. Out of boredom and frustration, I decided to make some DNS changes on my computer. These changes were published as a use-at-your-own-risk recommendation by non-Etsy employees in the Comments section of the June 29 post on the Unofficial Etsy News blog.

In a nutshell, there are two workarounds floating around on the web that you may wish to try if you are still unable to access the Etsy site:

(1) Change your hosts file.
(2) Update the DNS settings on your network connection.

If you are like me, adding Etsy's IP address to the bottom of the Hosts file didn't work. So, the next workaround to try is one that you must use at your own risk. For information about these workarounds, visit the following link and read through the comments for instructions. Be sure to note that using this workaround has some risks:

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Venting About Etsy

OK. I haven't been able to get access to my Etsy shop since Friday morning. The folks at Etsy decided to move their servers to a new data center, and the DNS entries for the servers were changed. I understand the whole concept of updating DNS, and I get that one just has to wait as the changes are populated throughout the internet.

BUT...

I will say that their handling of this whole DNS change has been a big disappointment. First, a move of this nature was not announced in advance to Etsy sellers. There are some sellers who really depend on Etsy for their business.

Second, I've worked at networking companies doing corporate communications before and as a paying customer, not having access to my account because of a unannounced change is something that I am finding is pretty frustrating. Telling me its my ISP may be the technical explanation, but why was the data center move something we (as paying customers) were not told about in advance?

Lastly, after the unforseen result of the change was reported, why didn't Etsy notify its seller base to let them know about the issue? They do have our emails. This isn't just a seller issue, buyers have access problems too. Perhaps I'm just venting because I haven't been able to access my shop in going on five days, but as a customer, I'd like to see some improvements made with Etsy's customer communications related to its networking services. How about a network issues and outage page where we can go for information and updates about our Etsy service? Customer service and managing communications with your paying customers are an important thing. Come on Etsy!