Yesterday we had a failure at our London datacenter which resulted in the service going down shortly at 15:00 GMT. Unfortunately this highlighted an issue and single point of failure that we had overseen with our disaster recovery strategy and immediately contacted our hosting partner as to how we could avoid the problem in the future.

We decided to replicate our entire infrastructure in London creating a stand-by setup in Dallas where by we could fail-over silently to this setup in the result of a failure at our London datacenter in the future. Unfortunately as part of the database replication setup our database became read-only which resulted in the Stubmatic.com service becoming unavailable at 05:00 GMT this morning.

We have now resolved this issue and our replication should now be stable and operational.

No data was lost in the incident and we now have a far more resilient infrastructure to prevent an occurance of this happening again in the future.

Best Regards,

Jon Baker

CEO Vibrant Apps Ltd

Booking fees are automatically added to your customer’s order and you get to keep 100% of that charged fee. This great new feature helps you cover costs such as the fees charged by PayPal and our subscription fee.

To start charging a booking fee, simply add a new or edit an existing event. Within the ticket details section you will see two new fields (See above). Simply specify a Booking fee value greater than 0 and the fee will automatically be added. You also have the option to charge the fee per ticket or order. Select “charge fee per ticket” if you want to charge per ticket, rather than per order.

As usual we welcome your comments and suggestions.

We appologise if this causes any inconvinience to our UK customers however, we have decided to charge in $ from now on mainly due to the fact that 81% of our user base are based in the US vs 7% based in the UK.

Users currently on our British Pound plans have the choice to remain on their current plan or choose to switch to the new plan. Switching plan is easy, simply visit your My Account page when logged into Stubmatic and clicking Change Plan. You will be asked if you wish to change to the new US dollar priced plans. Click yes and you account will be upgraded at the end of your current billing period.

TktIt users who have been given gift membership are unaffected however should you wish to continue your subscription at the end of your gift period, you will need to subscribe to one of our new US priced plans.

We have also added a new field to the Event details form labelled Event Type. This field has been added for future integration reasons. Some of our partner sites would like to retrieve events for a particular type, for example only music events. We have made it as light a feature as possible by having it remember the type of event you last added.

As always, please contact us with your comments / suggestions,

Regards,

Stubmatic Team

Our new home page has made a splash by being recently featured in Smashing Magazine as an example for their article titled “Strategic Design: 6 Steps for Building a Successful Website”. Our homepage was featured as the example for Goal-driven design.

“To succeed, the website must make the best use of the very limited amount of attention visitors will be giving it by not only informing but educating them about what your product does, and selling the benefits it provides. Stubmatic uses design elements effectively to pursue those goals.”

Many thanks to our designer Dan Oliver (He is also available freelance).

You can read the article in full on Smashing Magazine’s website.

1. Re-listing events

As of today, any event that is completed before its start date or new box office close date can be re-listed. Not only can you re-list events that you may have completed by accident, you can also now use this feature to temporarily pause sales.

Completed events are not displayed on either your box office, MySpace App or widgets, however if you link to the event directly, users can still visit the event page but they are notified that there are currently no tickets. If an event is re-listed it will automatically re-appear in your box office listings etc.

2. Specify a date and time to complete events (ticket sales)

You can now optionally specify a box office close date. Stubmatic will automatically complete your event at this date / time preventing any further ticket sales.

3. Further social network integration - Add This!

You will notice a new ‘Add This’ button on your box office and events. Users can now use this service to bookmark / share your box office and event pages with their friends via most social networks that they may use. Another tool to help promote your events.

4. Buy Now buttons

We have made it even easier to use our buy now buttons for your events. Simply visit the Promote pages and create buttons in black or white for any published event.

5. Further Search Engine Optimisations

We have made further tweaks to improve the Search Engine Optimisation of your event pages and box offices this should help provide even better search engine ranking of your pages.
As usual, please feel free to drop us an email or contact us using the contact form.

NOTE: We have some further changes to make tomorrow evening (27 Oct 08) at roughly 10pm GMT. Our member pages, box office and sales pages should be unaffected by the update.

Our new app gives a dynamically updated window to your box office automatically listing all your currently listed events. Anyone browsing your MySpace profile will see your box office listing. Clicking the buy button next to an event, will take them directly to that event’s purchase page.

Your users follow the normal payment process on the Stubmatic pages and you get your payment as usual, directly to your PayPal account.

Installing the app is really easy!

1. Visit the Stubmatic App’s MySpace profile page

Navigate to http://www.myspace.com/stubmatic and click Install Application

2. Accept the default settings

Ensure Show on homepage and Show on profile are both selected

3. Set you username

Enter your Stubmatic username and set an optional title to be displayed on your profile box office such as Vibrant App’s Box Office

4. Start selling from your profile

Your events are automatically listed on your profile page.

URLs

The first thing we have done, is to simplify the URL used to access your personal box office. Although the old /myboxoffice/<username> addresses still work. You can now omit the /myboxoffice/ text and simply direct your customers to:

http://www.stubmatic.com/<username>

We have also made changes to the event listings page to make it easier to find each individual event’s public sales url. You will now find these listed under each event.

Search Engine Optimisation

We have also put a lot of effort into integrating with Google, Yahoo and MSN search, such as automatically notifying them when a new event is published as well as numerous other tweeks and we are hoping this will drastically improve user’s box office and individual event page search engine performance.

Promotion Tools

We are currently working on some new Promotion Tools and hope to be announcing the availability of our MySpace app along with some new widgets shortly. For now we have made available a new set of buttons as well as our logos available to you, to help promote your events on Stubmatic.

As always we welcome your questions, comments and suggestions. Please feel free to contact us or post to our forums

The app is currently pending approval by the MySpace team and we will let you know as soon as you can install it on your own MySpace profile.

Also keep an eye out for new buttons which will be available on the “Promote” page when you are logged in…

As usual if you have any queries or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us.

PS - I will hopefully be announcing an exciting new feature on Monday…