Wow, are our tails wagging with excitement! Dogster (and our kitty site Catster) are finalists in CNET’s Webware 100 award in the Community category!
And we love to win if for no other reason than to thanks each and every member of our community! Without them, we’re a dog without a bone!
Voting is open thru June 11th. Click here to cast your vote for Dogster!!
The CNET Webware 100 awards give kudos to the best web applications out there. And the winners are chosen by the public–the folks that use and peruse the internet every day.
People like you!
The winners will be announced on June 18th. Paws and tails crossed. And as always, thanks for your support! WOOF!
Here’s some really neat news: Facebook, one of the biggest and safest online communities, invited us to create mini-applications so any Facebook user can embed cat photos from our site to display in your Facebook profiles.
To kick things off we made a fun one, where you can simply see a stroll of cute cats, and we made an important one, where you can show cats in your area that need rescuing. In just a couple more days we’ll release an even cooler Facebook application that will allow you to show off your own cat’s photos on your profile page!
Here’s the permanent link to see all the Catster Facebook Applications
A really common question we get is how can I do special things with my photos? Once upon a time it used to require having complicated software and a lot of patience and skill.
But recently there has been a litter of websites that make it really easy to do most anything you could imagine with your photos. We just posted a new FAQ on it, but here’s the shortlist.
To resize, crop, tint, adjust, tape together photos, try these out:
To animate and decorate your photos with images, captions, and a lot of other fun:
If you like using any of these let your friends (and us) know!
Hi Everyone,
Thanks for putting up with the downtime. We’ve reconfigured our search functionality in Forums so it’s available again and works much better. Some searches will still take a while (there are well over 1,000,000 forums entries to search) but you will always get results and those results will be even better then they were before.
Yipppeeeee!
Hi everyone! We’ve got some short-term bad news for some members.
It came to our attention today that some of the large email services such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and more are delivering our email into spam or bulk folders. This is related to our upgrading servers this week as they are suddenly thinking we’re spammers. We’re pretty frustrated with this, but to them were’ just IP addresses and if their algorithms think we’re suddenly spammers, then they block our mail and don’t even notify us. But enough, griping ;>
We’ll be working very hard to prove we’re the same trustworthy site we’ve always been, but this may take anywhere from 12 hours to 5 days to fix.
If this is affecting you you can consider switching your account email to a different address, if you have one, and then revert to the original when this is resolved. Or you can always just check in on you account through the website, to see if you have friends requests, new rosettes, mail or group messages.
Huge furry apologies for every one affected by this.
Woof and meow everyone. Just a head’s up that late this evening we will have to take the site offline for a couple hours so we can start serving our pages from our state-of-the-art data center.
The site will be completely offline starting at:
12:30am EST
9:30pm PST
The sites will be back up after a couple hours =)
Please note that while we tweak our network setting for the new data center and rebuild a lot of our cache files, it’s likely you’ll find the site slow or jerky if you are using it early early Friday morning. They’re always some bugs and glitches you can only catch once everything goes live. But know that we’ll be working on it double time.
Woof & Meow!
Dogster & Catster are growing so quickly that we are looking for a part-time Community Support intern to work along side our Community Manager and Customer Support Manager.
This will initially be a local (SF Bay Area only) part-time position for approximately 20 hours a week. There is the possibility of growing into a full-time position with time and experience.
What we are looking for:
The ideal candidate is well-versed in online communities and has some professional or personal experience in online forums and interacting with others in online communities. Excellent communication and writing skills are important as is a desire to learn A LOT. Experience with, knowledge or love of pets would be a bonus!
Some of the things you will do:
–Review and edit inappropriate content on pet pages, forum posts and other areas of the site.
–Assist in quality control through review of certain types of pet pages
–Contribute to pre-release product testing and quality assurance
–Assist with customer support e-mails
This will be a dynamic position where priorities could shift at a moment?s notice. We are a very small company where each of us wears many hats-the CEO even answers the phone!
Oh-and you must love working alongside a couple of awesome dogs like Ripley and Moxie :)
To apply, please e-mail a resume and a cover letter highlighting your relevant experience to community_support@dogster.com. We are open to working with the ideal candidate’s needs regarding schedule. Calls regarding this opportunity will not be taken.
Many tail wags and head bonks,
HQ
Woof and meow everyone!
Important News: the sites are going to be completely unavailable Thursday May 11th between midnight -3am EST (May 10th between 9pm-midnight Pacific time) so we can move to our new state-of-the-art server data center.
The very good news is that we have replicated our entire server architecture onto brand new bigger, faster and better networked servers. This means faster, more reliable site surfing for you, even though our site usage is consistently growing at a rapid pace.
The catch is that changing data centers of a live website is akin to transferring all the contents of one fast moving 18 wheeler to another. We’ll be able to do most all of the changes while the site is still on the day of the 10th, but we’ll have to take the sites offline late Thursday night, early Friday morning. Once the sites are live again, we’ll be testing into the wee hours (and through sunrise if needed) to make sure everything is perfect. There is a chance during that period you’ll encounter site slowness or non-responsive. We have 27 productions servers working in deep coordination somethings you just can’t test until they are working under heavy worldwide usage. So if the site seems odd, know that it just needs some fine tuning, and we’re on it. If the problem remains please contact us (we’ll set up a forum for fast notifications)
We’re so sorry this requires any downtime at all, but rest assured this will be a major improvement and the single biggest server upgrade we have ever undertaken! More updates will come as we get closer
Wow, this is really amazing! On Monday, April 30th, we welcomed our 400,000th member to the sites of Dogster and Catster! Isn’t it just amazing to have all this cat and dog love all in one place!
Now, if you think that’s an impressive number, here’s a few more for you to chew on:
• Dogster and Catster members have uploaded more than 2,000,000 cat and photos to the site
• Members have formed more than 15,000,000 connections with other members
• There are now more than 9,100 member-established Dogster and Catster groups.
Wow! Who WOULDN’T want to be part of our pup and kitty loving community.
