Andrea found a new online site for selling handmade craft items, 1000 Markets. As soon as she mentioned it on Twitter, I popped over and checked it out. I liked what I saw and signed up right away!

It’s pretty easy to set things up, and the fees are comparable to other venues once you consider that you are paying a single fee, not separate fees like you do when you use PayPal with Etsy. I spent some time the last couple of days getting my shop set up and putting just a few products into it so it could get approved and go live. I haven’t heard back about the approval, but hopefully there will be something in my mailbox by tomorrow morning.

Go check it out — I’m at Art of the Firebird there, of course.  So far it looks like Andrea and I are the only two lampworkers, so if we can get some people visiting there, we may just have a sales venue to work with.

No posts for the past three days because I finally got totally fed up with Livehost.net.  Apparently they have been subject to a number of virus attacks, and sites hosted by them have been hacked more frequently than the norm.  Combine that with the email problems (my emails from GlassHaven being rejected by Comcast, Bellsouth, and Clearwire for abuse by other users of the mail server) and enough was enough.  Time to move!!!

I set up a new hosting package through Crucial Web Host on Monday; once the account information came through yesterday I set things up and started moving files over.  Art of the Firebird first, because that was just moving files; then this blog and my mailing lists, which meant moving databases.  Once they were pretty much okay and I was pretty sure I knew what I was doing, I moved the GlassHaven.  That was the real tricky job — a database setup and software install from scratch, followed by replacing the default database with the old one from the old host, plus making sure all the other files got transferred over.  Do this without losing data, and with minimal downtime — quite a goal, but I think I hit it pretty well.  TGH was down for less than an hour, in the middle of the night, so Anastasia was pretty much the only one who noticed!

It’s taken the site location changes most of the day to propagate through the DNS system, but they finally seem to be getting themselves corrected.  I was able to set up redirects at the old location to get people to the new one, so there wasn’t any screaming paranoia from the board going down.  Really — I think this whole move was a pretty nicely handled little technical challenge if I do say so myself!