We tried this once before, and got a paltry 42 diggs. With over 120 developers (many with multiple employees) participating, it certainly seems like we can do better than that. So how about it folks? Whether you’ve already been featured and want to drive traffic to the Extended Deals page, or your day is coming up and you want people to subscribe to the RSS feed, digg the article here:
http://digg.com/apple/Save_20_on_Great_Mac_Software_With_MacSanta
Earlier today (December 3rd), the MacSanta web site at http://www.macsantadeals.com went down. We’re still trying to ascertain just what happened, though currently, the problem appears to be cured.
We rapidly moved the site to our dedicated server at Pair.com, and I anticipate no further issues. We changed the DNS nameservers to point to Pair, and now we’re just waiting for these changes to propagate fully. If you’re reading this, that change has happened for you and you’re accessing the Pair version of the site.
“What would possess you, you of all people, to host this with DreamHost?”, I can hear you asking. Well, MacSanta began last year as something of a last minute scramble. DreamHost makes for a great sandbox to set things up, as you can rapidly add features on (MySQL, say) without needing to wait for help. It’s free to add on like this (or at least, already paid for), while we’ll be incurring additional (minor) charges to host at Pair. And of course, it worked just fine last year. So we stuck with it. In a single word, “Whups”.
As of around 3:30 EST, the problem with DreamHost seems to be fixed. That means that regardless of your DNS, the site will load. In the next day or so, everyone will get the Pair version of the site, but we’ll obviously keep both around while that change propagates. That will hopefully be the end of the troubles. We’ll be featuring the deals from this abbreviated/spotty day 3 on day 4 as well, so tomorrow (12/4), there will be a full 10 deals for users.
To summarize: we’re back, and I believe we’ll be up for the rest of the month without further problems.
-Paul
MacSanta 2007 has officially begun! We’ve got everyone scheduled, and the updates are happening automatically, so things will be a lot smoother on our end than last year. Some notes:
• Sign-ups are closed for 2007, but if you want to be added to our announcement list for the future, just email macsanta@macsantadeals.com. Everyone who participated this year will be on that list automatically.
• MacSanta - Can You Dig(g) It? Click to Digg the story and send more traffic to the site.
• As far as additional promotion goes, any place you promote MacSanta is good for you, good for users, and good for your fellow developers. Don’t forget our badges either.
That’s all for now - things are off to a great start, and I think we’ll see momentum build throughout the month.
–Paul