To get in a better mood after the recent service issue, here is another contest!

The purpose of the contest is to improve the ultraguest.com free guestbook service and now you can help. Here are the rules:

• Bugs are reported using our bug tracker system (you may need to create an account in our forum)
• The first person to create a new issue is paid the following to their paypal account:
  • $10 for each major bug (functionality bugs and errors)
  • $5 for each minor bug (design, browser issues, usability etc)
  • $2 for each spelling mistake in on the front page, other ultraguest pages, and in the control panel. Spelling mistakes in guestbook posts are not a part of the contest
  • $1for spelling mistakes in this blog and in forum posts by me (Andreas)
• To get a refund you need to either register at the forum with your paypal e-mail, or send me a private message in the forum to the paypal e-mail you would like to get paid
• Duration: starting August 20 (today) and ending on December 31 this year.

As you can see from the first contest, the winner got paid $25. This time however, there can be as many winners as there are bugs.

Last night I decided to let my host perform a software upgrade on the main guestbook server to get some new features. Since I have alerts sent to my cellphone in case the server goes down and because of their expertise I did not worry about the upgrade (it was just minor software upgrade).

When I got up this morning I noticed that I had no e-mails about new messages in the demo guestbook and no new support tickets. Unusual, but it did not alert me until I typed www.ultraguest.com in my browser and got an empty page! I start to ask myself lots of questions: What happened? Is there something wrong with my Internet connection? Are my scripts incompatible with the new software? I know that every second UltraGuest serves several guestbook views. What do these users think? Will people stop using the service because of this?

It turned out my host had performed the upgrade, but did not check that the it was successful(!). Once they fixed the issue it turned out that there was an old bug in the guestbook system that the previous version of the software did not complain about, but with the new version it was not possible to create new messages.

To those of you that tried to alert me of the problem: of course the support system went down together with the rest of the website. I get all support tickets sent to my blackberry, but with no support system - no support tickets.

I have already looked at a few solutions that will prevent this from happening in the future: an expensive load balancing system with database clustering and  less expensive system that notifies my when pages do not display the way they should.

I would like to apologize to those of you that were unable to access guestbooks during the downtime and sincerely thank you for your patience. While I don’t have an SLA agreement for those of you who have paid to upgrade, I ask that you contact me and I will provide a compensation for the downtime.

Okay, time for the first contest with a $25 cash price! Here is how it works:

• create a comment to this entry and tell us what’s the main purpose of your guestbook (wedding, website, blog etc.)
• remember to include a link to your guestbook (UltraGuest.com guestbooks only)
• use your paypal email when writing the comment (winner will be paid via PayPal)
• a winner will be picked by random in one week (on Tuesday, July 22nd)
• the winner will get $25 USD
• winner will be announced in this blog

As this blog is brand new the chance of winning should be pretty good! And of course it costs nothing to enter this contest and it should take no more than 30 seconds to complete.

Good luck and remember watch this blog for more contests in the weeks to come!

I guess I won’t be posting to this blog more than once a week in the future, but being new to blogging I find this quite fun so I’ll create my second post today!

As I said in the first post I will tell you a little about the background of UltraGuest, and I’ll start off by telling you how I got introduced to the internet and how I purchased and started my first website. Btw, if you think these topics are complete garbage, please let me know! I told you I’m a newbie blogger… 

Back in the days (early 90’s) I ran a BBS (Bulletin Board System) to my parents great frustration - initially because the phone kept ringing day and night, later when I got my own phone line because of the bill. At the time I was still in high school and a friend of mine convinced me to attend a computer fair. This was back in 1994 and the internet was not something I’d never heard about. My friend knew how to use an application called Netscape Navigator and quickly showed me how this new technology could be utilized to display a webpage obviously intended for a more mature audience (I’ll just leave it there… ). Long story short, I figured out that the days of my BBS was gone and started exploring the web.

In 1997 I attended a boarding school in Colorado Springs (USA) and I found a domain that I wanted to purchase (I was already running a small website). There was only one problem:  a credit card for the payment. I did not have a credit card, but friend of mine for Germany had his fathers credit card that he could use for emergencies only. I quickly convinced him to let me borrow the credit card (I paid him cash and we are still friends! ) and I got my own domain! I already had a website that I created in 1995, but now I would really go after the big guys! That’s what I was thinking anyway. Being young and naive I quickly ripped of parts of my favorite website, The Free Site, assuming that everything on the internet was free and that all content cold be “borrowed”. That was of course until the website owner contacted me to let me know that it was in fact not the case. I deleted the stolen content and started building my own “portal”! However, I was more focused on the About Us page than the actual content and the site has long ago been abandoned (If you are looking for a good freebie site I recommend The Free Site which is run by a great guy who knows how to create original quality content. The site has been in business forever, and it is still by far the best freebie resource around).

Long story short, instead of linking to free resources I decided to create something to give away for free. While guestbooks are perhaps one of the oldest services around, there were not many high quality sites. Since my programming skills were not all that great I figured I’d go for something simple. So a guestbook service it was, and with my limited creative ability I found the domain name www.ultraguest.com. At first I purchased a guestbook host script that I found on HotScripts.com, however, the scripts was not very good and I decided to learn PHP/MySQL. During my christmas holiday in 2002 I wrote the first version of UltraGuest and on the catchy date January 3, 2003 I launched the site. Of course, no one showed up until much later. More on that in my next post

These days virtually every website has a blog and so I decided to create one for UltraGuest. While I’ve created websites for more than 10 years (starting in 1997 when I was in high school), this is my first blog. Being a newbie blogger your feedback is appreciated!

So why a blog? Hopefully this blog will give the site a more personal touch, let you know some more about the site, perhaps get to know me a little better and hopefully give some feedback as to how the website can improve. In addition I will use to blog for some contests (real cash prices!) and perhaps some other surprises. 

I’ll start off by telling you a little about myself and my background:

My name is Andreas and I’m a 28 year old male born in Oslo (Norway) where I have lived for most of my life. I went to high school for a few years in the US (Colorado Springs), and I’ve spent a year living and working in China. I attended business school for four years, but I spent pretty much the whole time working. My work experience spans over several sectors from retail and logistics to real estate and the travel industry. In my last job that I had for more than two years I was responsible for more than 300 employes and a revenue of almost $100 million dollars (not to be bragging, but I’m just really proud of that! ). In my spare time I enjoy exercising (I could need more of it these days!), skiing (of course, being a Norwegian), running in the forrest (close to where I live), reading (renewable energy is my latest interest) and hanging out with friends.

So how does UltraGuest and websites fit in? Well, I guess it really doesn’t, but I am very fascinated by the internet, websites and the technology behind in particular. In my next post I’ll let you know how I got introduced to the internet and how I started my first website. Later on I’ll go into a bit more details about UltraGuest and a bit about why I decided to start a free guestbook service.

Until then, have a great day and thanks for reading my blog!