We experienced some downtime this morning, approximately 7:00-9:30 AM PDT. Some of the dibs.net servers unexpectedly rebooted (something that you have to plan for in an environment like Amazon EC2). The outage would have been quite a bit shorter except for another problem that surfaced during startup, causing some services to not come back online automatically.

Unfortunately, until Amazon offers the ability to float an IP address, this sort of outage can hit any web application hosted on EC2. For the time being, however, fixing the startup scripts to decrease any outages should be sufficient for these early days of dibs.net.

With the latest batch of updates and fixes pushed out to the servers and our first week in the bag, dibs.net sure is looking great.

I spent a huge amount of time today on image uploading improvements. What was in place just didn’t work very well. The new image uploading process is vastly improved and really fun to use, if uploading images could be considered “fun.” Uploading now requires Flash 7 or higher, but that’s a trade-off I decided was worth it: uploading images is a notoriously painful task on the web, so efforts to make it easier have a great return on investment.

As a small side-effect of this improvement, the workflow also changed slightly in that you can save a draft of your listing as you add your photos (so you aren’t forced to post an item without photos and then add them later). This also turns out to be a handy feature if you want to work on a draft listing over a few sessions.

There are a just a few things left that I’d like to get in before I start really promoting the service and attracting users, which is looking like it will be some time next week. While the service is entirely usable right now, there are several places that need some paint and one or two that need some reorganization (Messages, I’m lookin’ at you).