Logging in and Credit Cards

Two issues I've noticed after everything was moved over.

1. The Secured Certificate hasn't transfered to the new server. That should be rectified in the next day or so. We have taken down the credit card payment option until that is transfered to avoid exposing your credit card information to super nerds who somehow know how to capture that information when not properly secured.

2. I noticed that I was unable to properly log in on the new server.. Don't know why but the cookie from the old server doesn't update to the new one. It can be fixed in a few easy steps.

In IE:

1. Go to Internet Options (in the latest version it is Tools/Internet Options)
2. Under the General tab, Browsing History section, click Settings
3. Click view files
4. Delete two cookies the cookie for bargainbaseballcards.com and the cookie for www.bargainbaseballcards.com
5. Attempt to login. It should all work.

Any other issues just let me know.

Moving to a new server!

After a few weeks of inconsistent performance we are moving to a new server. What this means for you:

Tuesday evening at about 9 pm BBC will go offline. We will be changing name servers at that time. (not actually offline.. we will replace the current pages with the helicopter game... play it, its awesome.)
Starting at 9 we will feverishly move all the data from the old server to the new server.
The new name server information will propagate throughout the internets at whatever pace that sort of thing occurs. Eventually it'll get to your ISP.
When the new information gets to your ISP you will get BBC on the new server when you type BargainBaseballCards.com instead of the helicopter game. I would expect that by Thursday morning everyone will be pointing at the new server.

All of your account information will be moved. If you are a registered user your shopping cart should move too.

Email me with any questions.

Anticipated downtime

UPDATE 7:00 PM 4/27:

The website is running almost as it should be. I have opened the order checkout back up so you can place orders. If you have any trouble at all please let me know.

Thanks.

Chris.

UPDATE 2:30 PM 4/27:

Still nothing. At this point, I'm probably going to have to switch service providers. It is clear the current service provider doesn't appreciate the issues.

END UPDATE

UPDATE 8:55 PM 4/25:

The website is back up.. Unfortunately the ASP engine is a bit askew. There are issues with the "SUM" function in SQL. Long nerd story short: the shopping cart relies on this function. You can't place an order until we get to the bottom of the mystery. I'm working on it until its fixed.

END UPDATE


Due to the recent surge in traffic and subsequent server issues we are moving BargainBaseballCards.com to a new server this afternoon. Some may be unable to reach the site for up to an hour. I apologize for the delay, but this should ensure that we run much more smoothly in the future.

Thanks.

Chris.

We're Back..

With some reservations I'm happy to report that we are up and running. If you experience any issues please let me know.

Chris.

The website is down! :(

As many of you are now aware, our website (BargainBaseballCards.com) is unavailable at the moment, and has been for the most part unavailable since about 3 yesterday afternoon.

As best we can determine we are the victim of a DDOS attack. This is the second attack in the last 90 days. I find it odd that my site, a baseball card site, would be the target of a DDOS attack. But alas..

There are a couple of different emotions I feel on this. First, "Well, I'm pissed off Rick." (an hommage to South Park's Fat Camp) But once I've gotten over the frustration its a little bit flattering. We've become important enough to someone, somewhere that they spent the time and effort to attack us. If you are irrelevant that never happens.

So, I guess there's that. But I'm still pissed off.

An additional post will come when everything blows over. Last time it was only about a day.

The Specials Section at BBC.

Okay.. so I'm kind of a dork/incompetent scatterbrain.. If there is one thing I've been really good at over the years, its setting up a new feature that requires some ongoing attention.. providing that attention for about 6 months.. then um.. getting distracted. This blog is/was a prime example. (Though I've been really good over the past few months)

That was the fate of the "Specials" section of our website. The first handful of months I put that section up I faithfully updated the Specials each Monday morning with new specials. Then.. well, focus shifted elsewhere and I forgot to go back and update the specials. I'm pretty sure the same 3 specials that never sold out sat on that page for 2 years. (perhaps they weren't that special if they never sold out) Alas, I have resurrected that dead portion of the website, and hopefully have come up with a system that will prevent this same situation from occuring again.

On my desk is a box. In that box are all the cards that currently find themselves in our specials section. If I remove a card from that box to ship to a paying customer.. I must put a new card in that box. (so, you see, the box should always have cards in it.. cards that change regularly) But wait! There's More!

In addition to this, each Sunday I will review the cards currently in the specials section. If the card has been on the specials page for a week and hasn't sold, I'm going to lower the price. I'll do this every week until the card sells. (to make sure we keep fresh new cards rotating through the specials section.) Right now there are about 10 cards in the Specials section.. I hope to increase that over the next few weeks to about 20. At that point there should ALWAYS be about 20 cards on special.

So.. um.. buy one?

Counterfeit Public Service Announcement

I saw this recently and thought it important enough to post here.

Recently there have been a lot of the 1993 BBM Ichiro rookies on ebay. More than we typically see, and because of the volume the prices have dropped. Unfortunately a lot of those hitting eBay appear to be counterfeit. I'm going to stick with "alleged" and "appear" even though, when viewing the pictures I'm pretty certain they are fake. You can make your own decisions.

I'm going to post a few images, but the work was done by "cwesley" on the Beckett.com message boards. He lives in Japan, and keeps an eye on these BBM rookies.

Real:



Alleged Fake:




Be very careful when purchasing these. Ask for a high res scan if you are buying online.

Influx of 1993 BBM Ichiro Cards on eBay - Beckett.com

The Card O' The Day (or every third day) - 2005 Donruss Champions 365 Alex Cintron

Card O' The Day Volume 5: 2005 Donruss Champions #365 Alex Cintron



2005 Donruss Champions

I can't say much about 2005 Donruss Champions from personal expierence. I started growing frustrated in 2004 with the mass product from Donruss that was basically the same as everything else they produced. It had a different name and design but the products were basically the same.. structure, inserts.. Long sentence, just to say, I didn't buy this. I did buy one complete set from someone, and broke that up.. thus, I have about half that set still available. The design is outright pathetic. Action photos pushed to the far left, with blank space through 2/3rds of the card. Sure it looks good when you stick a relic on the rest of the card, but the base cards shouldn't suffer so the relic parrallel's can look good.
The set was a mix set of current and retired players. A bit obnoxious in that they'd have multiple cards of the same player spread throughout the set with no apparent reasoning to who got more cards. There are 3 Adam Dunns. 4 Andres Galarragas. Only 1 ARod. I never got it. On top of that, for many cards (many many) the player would be shown in one uniform on card front, but on the card back they would feature a season in which the player played for a different team. Really, thats just dumb. Boxes of this stuff is kind of pricey ($100) but its got 8 relics/autos per box.. so there's that.

Alex Cintron

I have it in my head that Cintron has been around for decades. He's just one of those guys that seems to always be around, but never really any good. But at the same time I'm also suprised that he's still in the league. He's a middle infielder, known by most for his years with Arizona. He played for the White Sox for a couple of years. He was cut by the Cubs this spring and then signed a minor league contract with the Orioles. He's only 29... I know. Shocked.

The curse of Google.

I love google. Don't get me wrong. Google is the search engine I use. Google is responsible for 70% of my websites search engine provided traffic. Really, they are the only game in town that matters. MSN? Yahoo? Whatever fellas.

I haven't given a thought to google page ranking, google search engine rankings or any of that in 4 years. I was selling cards.. business was steady.. I didn't see how worrying about that was a valuable use time that could be better spent filling orders and putting new cards out on the website.

Then I sat down next to a guy at Tupelos in Hillsborough (nice place, near Chapel Hill for all those UNC fans out there) who happened to also have his own website. He's asking about my "analytics". Honestly, I wasn't even sure what he meant.. but I pretended. I then went straight home and googled it. I found out after putzing around that BargainBaseballCards.com is ranked #1 on Google for "Baseball Cards for Sale", "Baseball Card Commons", and "Baseball Card Singles". That's pretty sweet. We are also on page two for "Baseball Cards" also awesome, considering the last time I had checked (again, 2004) we were on page 12 or something rediculous. I also found out that we had a page rank of 3. Apparently thats ok. Not great, but as far as baseball card websites go, there aren't many, if any, that rank any higher.

This whole series of epiphanies happened about 10 days ago. I was on a mini-high. I never knew I was so well positioned. Woohoo. I found myself searching those keywords and checking that page rank every day. WooHoo... Still looking good. Granted I had gone four years without giving it a thought, but here, now, it was on my mind all the time.

Then: Tragedy! Google apparently updates their page ranks every few months. They did so in the last few days. We went from Page Rank 3 (sweet) to Page Rank 0 (eeGads) I had a mini-meltdown. The sky was falling.

I have no idea how Page Rank is calculated, or really what it even means. 3 weeks ago they could have bumped me down and I wouldn't have noticed or cared. I don't think it affects business (because we are still #1 for the above keywords). Really, I don't know if the Page Rank matters at all. But it sure did depress me seeing that big fat ZERO.

So.. thanks Google. Your metric that apparently has no bearing on search rankings, and isn't going to affect my business one iota has put me in a depression for reasons I can't quite explain. Jerk.

I'll forgive you tomorrow when I look at my google analytics and see all those visitors you sent. I can never stay mad at you long.

So I looked up how Page Rank is calculated, and though it is patented, it still seems to be cloaked in mystery. In any event, links from other websites factor in greatly. I have been ignoring link requests for four years. Again, didn't seem very important. Apparently others are more aware than I am.

So, here is my call. You have a website tangentally related to baseball cards? Baseball? Curling? Pretty Ladies? (okay, maybe not the pretty ladies, unless its, you know.. "tasteful") Send me an email (chris@bargainbaseballcards.com) and I'll link to you at BargainBaseballCards.com.