Zibity

Broomstick has been featured in LifeHacker!

A lot of exciting things have happened in the past 24 hours for Zibity. Yesterday evening, LifeHacker (a popular technology news website) posted an article about Broomstick. I’m really excited to have been featured on such a high-profile website.

Unfortunately, at 22:47 GMT yesterday, my downloads server, downloads.zibity.com, was swamped, ran out of funds, and went offline. Luckily, this website, www.zibity.com, is not hosted on the same server, so it was safe, however having my downloads server go offline meant that all of the new traffic from LifeHacker couldn’t download Broomstick.

So that was the situation that I woke up to this morning. I immediately transferred more funds over to my hosting provider, and my downloads server has been back up since 8:24 GMT.

Despite my downloads server having been offline for most of the night, over 700 new users have now installed Broomstick. I’ve also had over 200 new requests for the addition of apps to be able to be hidden. While this is fantastic an I’m very keen to expand the list of apps that can be hidden, please be patient as it will take me some time to work my way through all of these requests, in addition to juggling all of my school commitments.

Some of the comments that I’ve been receiving about Broomstick have been slightly negative, with people wondering whether Broomstick is of an appropriate quality to have been released to the public. Please remember that Broomstick is currently only beta software, and that I’m happy to receive all manner of bug reports. Please direct these bug reports to my contact form.

So, to conclude:

• I’m very happy that Broomstick has been featured in LifeHacker.
• I hope that having my downloads server go offline didn’t inconvenience anyone too much.
• I’ve learnt a valuable lesson about being prepared for surges in traffic.
• I’m currently on holiday, but once I get back I’ll work to clear the backlog of app requests

Thanks everyone for being so supportive. If you particularly like my apps, please consider making a donation to help support future development.