In order to prevent the catalog from being unavailable over the weekend, we are disabling new products and updates from being pushed to the catalog search engine while we resolve the problem. Users will still be able to purchase products and search the catalog as usual, but new products won’t be reflected in the results.

Source: IMVU Forums

Guess I can take my time submitting new products this weekend. Someone will have to let me know if new products are visable in our catalogs if the *search* isn’t used to get there (direct linkage).

Update 11-8-09
What they neglected to tell us is that new items submitted wouldn’t be accessible at all. Usually, I can submit items as “not visible in catalog”, then prepare my sales pages before submitting them to PR. I submitted 13 new hairstyles Friday night, and can’t get at them to add my sales page coding. Nice. One additional sentence in their lil announcement would have made that clear, and I would have waited to submit all together. *frustrated* I picked a really bad time to start making new items again.

It’s not very often that I have an evening to myself, but tonight I get the house to myself… so I had planned on spending the evening creating some new items to add to my IMVU catalog. I look forward to these times, because to me it means “playtime in PhotoShop”. lol

When I sat down at my computer, graphic tablet pen in hand… I was so very disappointed to see this:

Of course, it was being discussed in the forums. I’m glad too, because DA5 gave us a tip on how to get to your items even if the catty is down:

Everyone can get to their products by using their Dev reports link on their hp’s and then going to your products list. Once there scroll and find the product you are looking for and click on it it will load the pp and from there you can do whatever you need to.

As far as I know, the downtime only lasted a couple of hours here on the East Coast… it’s working for me now, so I will get to enjoy some creating playtime tonight after all, whew!

Now Available… uh… Psych!

In other IMVU news, I received an email notice about an official IMVU Blog post about the added feature that will allow us to assign room moderators in our public rooms. When I went to the online blog so I could send out the page link to my Twitter friends, it just wasn’t there. Still isn’t!

I don’t know how the post got sent out through their RSS feed, without showing on the site (unless the post was hidden or deleted after it was published in error or too soon). I haven’t tried to create a room since getting that notification either, so don’t know if it’s actually in effect yet or not… but I am glad I signed up for email notices of their posts lol. Regardless, I hope this is something they do implement soon if it isn’t live yet, because it would be very helpful to the IMVU users that do host public rooms.

IMVU in the News

IMVU grew its revenue primarily by increasing the sale of virtual currency to its members, who use that currency to purchase virtual goods ranging from clothing for their avatars to furniture for their rooms. IMVU’s catalog of virtual goods is the largest in the world, with more than 3 million items created by IMVU members. The daily production of items sold is valued at about 175,000. It is not to my surprise that IMVU recently announced that the company has doubled its revenue in one year to a $25 million run rate and achieved profitability. At peak hours of game play and social network chats, the company estimates that there are close to 770,000 conversations and story lines being produced by members. Their virtual world and communities gain the marketing tools and technical support needed to support this 3D love fest.

dig that last sentence… anyone wanna comment?

As you can probably tell from some of the things displayed in my sidebar, I try to do my best to help Cancer Research charities. Social Vibe is one of the sites I use to encourage you all to do the same, you’ll notice them in my sidebar if you scroll down a little.

It was time for me to pick a new sponsor to make sure we take advantage of the Corporations willing to donate to the cause simply by clicking on that widget. (You have clicked it by now, right? If not, go do it now, I’ll wait right here for ya.)

*waits*

Thanks! I chose the CoffeeMate sponsor because 1.) I love the Hazelnut creamer, it’s one of my addictions, and 2.) The “Dress for Success” theme made me remember something that my last boss in Banking told me as we shopped for “black tie event” outfits together…

Dress well, and they remember the woman. Dress poorly, and they remember the clothes. ~J.S.

Remembering that day put a smile on my face, so I gladly clicked through to make sure CoffeeMate will be donating to the cause on my behalf. I sincerely hope you choose to do the same, thanks! =o)

I found these tonight while browsing… I’m a shoe-a-holic, I don’t try to deny it. I have a ridiculous amount of shoes considering how often I go out (not often). These are really cool though, because they’d go well with jeans, and wouldn’t take much room in the Road Glide’s side bag. Heh.

I love the platform toe, makes them easier to walk in. I never used to have a problem walking for hours in heels, but lately I need the platform to spend any amount of time in them. Harley mules are my favorites lately.

Who knows, Christmas isn’t far off now.

FYI: Nope, it’s not an affiliate link… just sharing a passion of mine

I can’t believe Halloween’s almost here already. Christmas decorations in the stores are out already and we haven’t even had the chance to scare our neighbors yet! What’s up with that? I doubt this will be one of those Halloweens where we’ll be able to walk the neighborhood without coats. It’s been in the lower 30’s every evening lately.

I haven’t been riding for a few weeks already. Between having a bad cold/flu for a week, and then the cold temperatures, I just haven’t had the nerve. Some years we ride right into December. I don’t think that’s going to be happening this year. I’ve packed away my riding gear, and have said my goodbyes to the bikes until spring.

I’ve been focusing on my design business, working with clients to build their ‘net presence, and moving new clients to my server. Re-designing existing sites and transferring their content to my CMS combo… keeps a wench very busy. In working with local business owners to build their Internet presence, I’ve learned a lot about the social networking systems popular on the Internet today.

One thing that I find rather disappointing after all my years on the Internet, is the fact that people still take so much at face value on the Internet. Rumors and unsubstantiated claims are spread like wild fire through sites like Twitter and FaceBook. Recent examples you may have heard of include “Balloon Boy” and Kanye West being killed in a car accident. False claims were made in both of those stories, yet they traveled across the internet within minutes.

Less sensational, similar incorrect claims were spread this past week about WordPress plugins being broken (don’t update/use this!), Private Twitter accounts being indexed in the search engines (security leak/bug!), among others.

Doesn’t anyone check out the validity of these claims before they do their part to spread these rumors, or do people just simply not care whether these things are true or not?

When I saw the message on Twitter saying that the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress was broken, advising us not to update it, I did some research. I found that the plugin was not broken, and wrote a post about it in my design blog hoping to silence some of the uselessly over dramatic (and erroneous) reports about the plugin. No good deed goes unpunished, though…

When I saw reports about there being a security leak in Twitter, I again did some research. Supposedly, the ‘tweets’ of the people who had chosen to keep their pages and activity on Twitter private were finding their posts and information indexed in the search engines. People were getting upset, making accusations, and in general making all kinds of threats toward Twitter for invading their privacy. A little research showed that the posts that were being found in the search engines were in fact indexed and stored while those homepages were actually public, and those people had since made their pages private. In other words, at the time this activity was indexed, they were NOT private. Twitter did nothing against their privacy policy, but uninformed claims would have you believe otherwise.

A little research, and even just reading the comments on sites reporting these types of issues will most times reveal the truth. Perhaps I’m one of the few bloggers/internet business people that still feel I have a responsibility to report the truth to the best of my ability. My web design clients depend on me to keep them updated on Internet trends and market research… they trust me to do so because I don’t spread every unsubstantiated rumor I read in blogs and/or social networking sites.

Needless to say, I haven’t had time to do much on IMVU developing. I did a small collection of Halloween items last year, if interested, check them out here.

I’ve been in a rather dark mood lately, so had to change up the look of my desktop to match. If you like dragons, celtic designs, and/or tribal flames, you might want to take a look at this one. Free to download from my DeviantArt account. Enjoy!

Dragon Flames WP by ~webwenchginger on deviantART

I know I’m probably a little late commenting on this, considering the size of the WordPress community, but for those of you that depend on my blog to keep you in the loop as to what’s going on I’ve got to post this. A recent worm virus has been targeting older, outdated WP blogs. There’s been much buzz on the Internet about the “security measures” you should take to secure your install of WP.

I went right to the source, and decided to take Matt’s word for it. I wasn’t surprised to see that he had already addressed all the “alternate security measures” being thrown out all over the place.

There is only one real solution. The only thing that I can promise will keep your blog secure today and in the future is upgrading.

Overall, his summary is basically how I feel. Just update, it’s the best way to make sure that future manifestations of popular viruses have a hard time getting into your install. All the security scanning plugins I’ve tried have compatibility issues with the other plugins I run, rendering them useless… plus the load on the server is too much.

WordPress is a community of hundreds of people that read the code every day, audit it, update it, and care enough about keeping your blog safe that we do things like release updates weeks apart from each other even though it makes us look bad, because updating is going to keep your blog safe from the bad guys. I’m not clairvoyant and I can’t predict what schemes spammers, hackers, crackers, and tricksters will come up with with in the future to harm your blog, but I do know for certain that as long as WordPress is around we’ll do everything in our power to make sure the software is safe. We’ve already made upgrading core and plugins a one-click procedure. If we find something broken, we’ll release a fix. Please upgrade, it’s the only way we can help each other.

Twitter’s turning out to be a great resource for news of what’s happening across the internet. I wanted to do some work on my laptop earlier, (after the last two site redesigns here and here, I needed a break!) and was confused when my Dell updates and GMail just wouldn’t work. After fighting with some of my security software, I left it running a scan and went to my office to at least check my email.

HootSuite is set to automatically open with my browser on my office computer, so when I opened that up, I saw a friend had sent a Tweet about GMail being DOWN. What? GMail doesn’t go down, or so I thought. It only took a couple of clicks, due to the trending topics links and hash tags used in posts to see that GMail had in fact been completely down for hours.

As HootSuite updated my Tweets, I saw news of Dell having uptime issues today too… at exactly the time I was trying to run my updates. Ahh. Mystery solved.

If nothing else, Twitter is proving to be very useful in staying “in the loop” as to what’s going on in cyberspace. With connections to the right people, I’m also finding tons of great resources to recommend to clients and readers of my Design Blog. Thanks to @cheth for the constant stream of important info!

The normal progression for me while I surf and keep updated through Twitter is to see a link to a resource, follow it, then if I find it’s something I might want to reference again, I send it to my StumbleUpon account and review it. This way, no matter where I am (I often have my laptop with me to cover client events and/or meetings) I can retrieve these important reference materials via any web browser. No need to ’sync’ my browser favorites, it’s all right there on StumbleUpon.

I use the Google Reader to bookmark other links that I may not want to show publicly… like client sites or my own obscure site links. I wouldn’t want to be accused of “spamming” my StumbleUpon account with all my own stuff lol.

Anyway, here are some of the links I’ve found recently that I will probably be referencing in the future…. some of them are bookmarked just because I want to remember to blog about them. What a great way to gather topics for future articles, I’m so happy to have found all this! (links below will open in new window)

Links of interest:

There ya have it… everything from geeky web stuff to Twitter tips. I can’t help it, I’m simply not happy unless I’m constantly learning! Oh… can’t forget my dose of daily cuteness over at IcanHazCheezburger…

Today’s kitteh giggle

Black Vintage Bundle

While in the planning stages for the Vintage clothing bundles, I tried to design a more “authentic” look than most present when trying to go for the “flapper” look. The stereotypical sequins, fringe, and feather boas were not what I wanted to do. I had visions of muted shades, smokey speakeasy’s, and delicately ornate dresses with matching accessories that you probably wouldn’t wear with any other outfit. Ahh the good ‘ol days!

There was a scene in a recent episode of True Blood that flashed back to the roaring 20’s, and I think that inspired me to go for the more ‘affluent’ look of the era. I was absolutely thrilled when I found a mesh for the type of hat I wanted, because in my opinion, the short vintage hair is done to death for that look on IMVU.

“Thank you for developing such wonderful 1920’s inspired clothing. I couldn’t believe that’d I’d found such high quality and original garments from that era, in your catalogue- which admittley I’d stumbled upon by chance. What luck!, I thought when trying your peach version of the Flapper dress, so you can imagine my elation when I discovered your whole range. You are ‘ The cat’s pajamas’, WWGinger. Have a marvelous day.”

Vintage Inspiration

The above feedback from a shopper today convinced me that there is a more mature audience on IMVU after all. One that appreciates authentic, realistic products. Now, I’m not saying that my lil 3D products look “real”… I mean they look like what real people were wearing in the 20’s. I mean, it’s not like the Desperate Housewives of the era went to church or high society events wearing feather boas. Well, maybe they did! LOL

I’m just enjoying the outlet for creativity that IMVU provides me. For a while, I was able to get lost in the fantasy of what I might want to wear if I were going to a secret speakeasy for a night out with Mr. Right. The only thing missing from my bundle is a sleek long cigarette holder, but *sigh* that would have made the bundle available to adults only, and not everyone my age is able to buy products in that category since you have to purchase the “Acess Pass” to wear and use those things.

Vintage inspired shoe, with a modern twist

For as much as I enjoy trying my hand at replicating ‘authentic’ period outfits, I will admit that I had fun putting a modern spin on the vintage shoe. There was a definite cause and effect here… because I couldn’t find a decent mesh with a low heel that didn’t make my feet look like a neanderthal, I had to take a non traditional heel and create a shoe ‘reminiscent’ of the flapper era using a modern mesh.

[A mesh is the 3D object that I decorate with my hand painted textures. I haven't yet started to make my own meshes only because there are so many that do it so much better than I could at the moment. I have everything necessary to do it since I still have all the programs from school... I just don't have the time to perfect those skills at the moment. Besides, I get to help support the very talented 3D artists in the IMVU community this way. ]

I’m very pleased with the result, and went through quiet a few different tries before coming up with something I was satisfied with, but I would still like to find a nice low heel mesh that I can turn into a more authentic vintage shoe.

Three out of the six vintage bundles have been submitted for Peer Review. Bundles always take a lot longer to clear than the individual items, so I have time to finish doing the sales pages for the remaining three colors. Black, Peach and Rose have been submitted. Lavender, Green and Blue should be done soon. The entire collection can be viewed by clicking the banner below.

Vintage clothing line for IMVU by WWGinger available in 6 colors

True Blood is one of my favorite shows, that I used to watch during the week after setting it to record on the DVR. I’ve become so enthralled with the show that I now wait anxiously every Sunday night for it to start. He hates to admit it, but hubby enjoys watching it with me! It’s wonderful entertainment, and as Episode 10 proved the other night, it can be really funny, in an admittedly strange way.

I went to the HBO site for True Blood, and read the synopsis of Episode 10 that just aired on Sunday night, “New World In My View”. I did not see this in the episode as it was aired!

If you haven’t yet watched Episode 10, which aired this past Sunday night, you’re not going to want to read the rest of this post, as it contains spoilers! I’m providing a cut at this point so that I don’t ruin anything for anyone that might find this! LOL

Bill arrives at his destination – a strange mansion patrolled by secret service agents, one of whom greets him, “Welcome, Mr. Compton. She’s expecting you.” Bill steps inside, bowing to his host and greeting her, “Your majesty.”

I find it intriguing that they chose not to show that lil bit in the version they aired. Secret Service? Huh? LOL There were no SS agents in the version I saw, and Bill did NOT address the Queen Vampire, instead, I saw him approach the open area where she seemed to be feeding. Although, we’re not really sure what the Queen was doing, all we saw was blood dripping from what seemed to be a suspended body, the foot being the only thing we saw.

Perhaps the producers thought that the cliffhanger ending of “Who IS the Queen anyway?”, and the… “has he just found her dead-for-good-this-time body, or was she just feeding?” (albeit, extravagantly… as a Queen Vampire should!) controversy would net a better response than it did?

If the Twitter buzz about the show is any indication, the True Blood “powers that be” should really think twice about cutting an episode that short.

Not that we’ll stop watching, no… we’re addicted as tho we’re feeling the affects of “V*” haha. But, when you upset your loyal viewers like that, they expect you to make up for it with something HUGE next week!

Hope you live up to our expectations!

I hope to get some comments on this … I know I felt like I was going to explode right after the show ended, because so many people I normally chat with hadn’t seen it yet, and refused to hear spoilers! LOL The nerve! hehe.

[tangent]
Gotta say, I love the Harley-Davidson ad on the True Blood Wiki, “Outrun the Sun” haha! Check out the “True Blood Iron 883“.
[/tangent]

*V – “V” is the slang used on the show to refer to Vampire Blood, when sold to Humans for it’s euphoric, hallucinogenic, and healing properties. On the show, the unscrupulous characters that sell “V” are similar to any of today’s drug dealers, in that they are selling an illegal, highly controversial substance. V dealers have to protect themselves from the Humans that hate Vampires, and the “Purist” Vampires that believe the only relationship between Humans and Vampires should be their positions on the food chain.  I can’t believe that Wiki didn’t have it listed in it’s entry anywhere.