On Thursday (12 Feb.), the Albanian Online Bookstore – ShtepiaeLibrit.com was unavailable for almost the whole day. This was very worrying to me because the problem was rather technical and the decision was made by the technicians of the hosting company. It took a few exchanges of messages to clarify the situation, before the issue got toward the way of getting solved.
Meanwhile, I’m sure customers or visitors going to the site yesterday must have wondered what was going on and there was almost no way to reach them. Today I placed an apology on the main page to let them know that everything is back to normal.
Another reason why this was concerning to me was because only a few days ago, on February 10th, 2009, we celebrated the 1st year anniversary of the bookstore. And obviously this would not be good publicity for anyone, especially if you are the biggest online store of Albanian books with over 10,000 visitors a month. And that is something to be proud of!
Oh, and something else. Now we have an English Blog called the Albanian Book House Blog, which I think should be of value to our English speaking visitors. It will not as many posts as the Albanian Blog, but nevertheless it is there to help improve the communication and information for our vistors.
What I’ve learned
I’ve learned that despite the fact that the general idea is that websites most often don’t break down, the fact is that they do. Like anything else which gets used a lot, sooner or later it is destined to break down or have some king of a problem. The main issue is preparing for such times and doing backups regularly.
I think one essential book that the bookstore is missing is Learn Albanian:Mesoni Shqip by Cezar Kurti. It’s a great book and has recieved a number of accolades over the years. I think it would be a great addition to the other books.
Martin, thanks for pointing that book out. Personally I was not aware of its existence. I will see if we can add it to ShtepiaeLibrit.com but then there are so many other books that we need to be adding like Country guides for tourists and other such stuff.
Anyway, your comment is much appreciated.
Elvis