Viddler

Update 10:45AM EST: Video thumbnails and your personal avatar on Viddler are just about the only pieces still missing from Viddler.com. We’re working to bring all of those back online, so don’t panic. But let us know if you have any other troubles besides this in the comments.

Update 5:30AM EST: Having trouble watching video? Check to see if the Viddler player is on “progressive”. If so - quickly change it to streaming (by clicking on the word progressive) and you should be good to go. We’re bringing Progressive Download back online as soon as we can.

Update 4:50AM EST: Although several portions of the site are up and running; you may have guessed, seen on Twitter, or in the IRC chat room - we’re still working on bringing back Viddler to full power. One of our storage servers, the one that (for the lack of better terminology) allows our player to connect to our Content Data Network (CDN) among other things, didn’t play nice in its new cage. Obviously an unfortunate circumstance, but we’re working on it.

I’m still in the IRC chat room - so if you have any questions - I’m there to help you. Oh, and as a side note, there might be a few small added benefits to this particular pickle we’re in. More soon.

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Tonight at around 12AM EST, or tomorrow morning if-you-will, we’ll be completely shutting down Viddler.com in order to make a giant move of our servers. This is no minor feat, and the downtime is unavoidable. Lets answer a few question so that we all know what is going to happen.

What will be unavailable?

To be completely clear about what will not work during this outage; I’ve made a list to hopefully keep the questions at bay a little. I’m making this list because each time we have a scheduled downtime I get many questions about what will be down, for how long, etc. During this time I wanted everything to be as clear as possible. I hope this helps.

• All of Viddler.com will be unavailable.
• Every video embedded on external sites will be unavailable.
• Any widgets that use our plugins (RSS feeds, etc.) will be unavailable.
• RSS feeds which supply your aggregator of choice, also unavailable.

When will this happen?

Much of our hardware team; Rob, Jason, and Todd, have made the trip to Phoenix, Arizona a few days ago and has been making preparations to make this transition go as smoothly as possible. As such, we expect the the downtime to only last about an hour.

Here is a short video Rob made during these preparations:

Video temporarily removed while unavailable.

This is a big move for Viddler and has been one we’ve all been awaiting anxiously for some time. These types of improvements, though they come with a little bit of downtime, are both unavoidable and exciting as we grow. We’re always striving to provide you with the best possible experience - and this is one big step into being able to do that even better.

If you have any questions, you can email me at cdevroe [at] viddler.com.

Update: Going to be awake during this downtime and want to chat with some of the Viddler team while this happens? You may join us via Pibb in the Viddler channel, or (which will be the same chat) you may use IRC and connect to #viddler-chat on irc.freenode.net.