can you see the shop!?

UPDATE: Fixed!!! By 86ing the problematic CNAME & doing an htaccess redirect (thanks Alex!), everyone can now see the shop! phew! (this has been SUCH A THORN IN MY SIDE! that is now gone – yay!)

:::

Earlier a friend IM’d me saying she couldn’t get to the WilloToons shop. She is using IE7 on Vista, but a bunch of other people using IE7 on both XP and Vista could see it fine, so I was dumbfounded at why it seemed that it was just her (and no it had nothing to do with a firewall at her company or anything).

So after asking a handful of other people, and having some people also say they couldn’t see it – but finding most of them could – I realize that Dreamhost has actually had some DNS issues today… so my shop.willotoons.com URL – that actually points to willotoons.myshopify.com – wasn’t resolving and basically giving them a message that the site could not be displayed/found. Real handy, Dreamhost! ug.

So anyway, very sorry if any of you have tried to access the store today, and been faced with that same unhelpful message. In the future, please don’t hesitate to tell me about it – or you can also always access the site through willotoons.myshopify.com. Not that this post will be of any help should this happen again & it’s archived (I’m at a loss!), but I’ll no longer have it autoforward to the shop.willotoons url, just in case.

Hosting issues like this are annoying because they’re so out of my control… but I guess I can only hope the large majority of you can see it fine. Can you? Feel free to leave a comment letting me know. And if you’re super helpful, will you tell me what platform (XP/Vista/Mac) and browser you’re on AND if you see the main nav buttons rolling over to the brown image on hover? Thanks peeps!

:::

UPDATE: Fixed!!! By 86ing the problematic CNAME & doing an htaccess redirect (thanks Alex!), everyone can now see the shop! phew! (this has been SUCH A THORN IN MY SIDE! that is now gone – yay!)

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17 Responses to can you see the shop!?

  3. xis says:

    Can get to the store ok and the nav buttons look ok too. FF on xp. However, the site looks funny at my resolution (1600×1200) (same as the pics I sent before). Mr. Cat is standing a good 400 pixels from the content…

    Reply
  5. Johnny says:

    Vista, therein lies the problem. I like the look of the shop and it looks great (already sent some minor comments to the W goddess!)

    Its funny how “Don’t you know who I am?!” has been so aptly used by friends recently. Geez, aint gettin no rezpects!

    Reply
  6. Mike says:

    Looks great in Safari, Mac OSX 10.4.8 (Tiger). It’s funny, I usually have had great luck with Dreamhost, but occasionally there’s an “issue”.

    Reply
  7. willo says:

    Ya, this issue is a biggie. I’m emailing support & they’re like “DNS might just take awhile to propagate”, and I’m like “uh, I set up this CNAME *months* ago”. ug. wish me luck!

    It seems it’s really specific to I.E. I really wish that browser would die already.

    Reply
  8. Lisa says:

    Sorry, Willo, I can’t see the shop either. I’m on Mozilla and I sometimes use IE 7.

    I figure it’s worth the wait though. I LOVE the look of your shirts! : )

    Cheers,
    Lisa in ottawa, Canada

    Reply
  9. Justin Z says:

    I had some issues when you first went live (XP in FF, at home AND work), but it’s working now. :)

    Reply
  10. willo says:

    Ya, it officially happens on FF, too – which makes me think it’s a DNS issue, but one which I somehow can’t fix!? Frustrating to say the least. Wish me luck.

    Reply
  11. HR says:

    I wasn’t able to get on either, but I thought it was because I run my own DNS server instead of using my ISPs. This may help though:

    nslookup -type=ANY willotoons.myshopify.com

    Server: hr64.com
    Address: 192.168.0.50
    Non-authoritative answer:

    willotoons.myshopify.com canonical name = argon.jadedpixel.com

    argon.jadedpixel.com internet address = 72.232.46.90

    It appears that willotoons.myshopify.com is a CNAME record pointing to argon.jadedpixel.com. It is not recommended to have any records pointing to a CNAME record (and I believe prohibited in RFC), although it works most of the time, some clients may not like it. Try pointing your CNAME directly to argon.jadedpixel.com.

    Reply
  14. willo says:

    I asked DH to flush the cache (it’s them that has to do that, right?), but they didn’t seem to act like they would do that. I will ask them again. I also just emailed shopify about it to see if they can lend any help.

    Thanks so much for your input – I am seriously so frustrated & dumbfounded by this, and really hope I can resolve it asap! I’ve been having to hold off on promoting the site till I know this is fixed. Already I’m afraid I’ve aliented so many potential buyers, it’s a bummer.

    Reply
  15. HR says:

    I meant your computer’s cache and DNS server, not sure how on a mac, but its start, run, cmd, ipconfig /flushdns on windows. argon.jadedpixel.com should resolve fine, but shows a message saying the shop does not exist, because the server is not configured to be accessed from that URL (it does point to the correct IP address tho), but if you CNAME shop.willotoons.com to it, I don’t see any reason for it not to work if the server is configured to be accessed from that address.

    Reply
  17. Paul says:

    To flush the DNS cache on a Mac (OS X), open Applications > Utilities > Terminal
    and type:

    lookupd -flushcache

    DNS problems are very frustrating, since changes to DNS should be propagated globally with little delay, but some ISPs cache DNS data longer than they should.

    Reply

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