Here at Gimlet, we’re thrilled to be heading past two milestones.
First: As of this evening, we’ll have passed a million questions. That’s a one, followed by six zeros. 1,000,000. Each of those questions is a memory of a patron talking to a librarian — via phone, email, or in person. In each case, someone needed help, and your staff provided it. Together, you’ve helped a million people since we launched; to say we’re humbled is an understatement.
Second: With that million questions, it’s time for Gimlet to move to a bigger server. Since we launched, Gimlet has been running on a server shared with fifty other clients (managed by the most excellent RimuHosting). We’ve worked hard to keep our code lean and mean and our overhead low, but there’s only so much blood we can get from this stone.
Therefore, we’ve just taken out a lease on our very own dedicated server. In addition to being used only by us, this server is newer and faster than our current hardware, and has fully-redundant power supplies — we actually have two separate generator backups. Power outages like we had this summer will no longer be a worry.
Over the next days and weeks, we’ll be migrating to this new server. We don’t expect much, if any, downtime during that migration process; we’ll keep you notified server if hiccups are possible.
Thanks again for making the first million questions in Gimlet a reality. We’re excited to have room for you to grow to the next millionl
Our hosting provider is currently experiencing a power outage. Gimlet will return when the electrons flow again. There seem to be rapid updates on this twitter stream.
Today, we had two long hours of unexpected downtime when the cabinet our server is located in lost power. We sincerely apologize for the service outage and thank all of you for your patience. As the data center and our hosting partner work to repair this issue, they expect additional downtime to occur.
They are reserving up to six hours to fix the issue, but expect the actual repair to take far less time. We apologize in advance for this additional interruption.
Support – Status Updates
We will always try our best to keep everyone informed about service interruptions — be it expected or unexpected downtime. Here are the best places online to check Gimlet’s technical status:
Our Twitter account will be the first place any news of an interruption is posted, and we will keep you informed there with real-time analysis and updates. Please strongly consider following our account.
You can always feel free to contact us directly for support issues, too.
This was certainly *not* the way we wanted to start the week, but it was a good reminder that we can always work to provide better service. We will be examining ways to better inform our clients about the status of Gimlet.
One option that is common online is to maintain a product status page (ex. Google Apps). If you would find this kind of solution an attractive option for monitoring Gimlet’s status, please leave a comment and let us know.
Again, we’re quite sorry for the trouble and we deeply appreciated everyone’s patience this morning.
It seems like just yesterday that I was writing, amazed, that our clients had added 58,000 questions to Gimlet. Really, it was a little more than a year ago.
Since then, things have exploded. Dozens of libraries and businesses from around the world have signed up; in combination, they’ve added more than half a million questions (523,029 as of this writing) to their knowledge bases. It’s amazing.
So! Thank you to everyone who has signed up, told a friend, or even just taken a look at us. We wouldn’t be here without you.
At ALA, I spent some time talking to other library software vendors in the exhibition hall. (If you’re reading this, thanks for talking to me!) By and large, people were very open and happy to share their vision of their product; often, they’d even give insight into the technical underpinnings of their software. However, there was one place where software vendors were almost universally unwilling to tip their hands.
Price.
There was no question that’d cause a software vendor to clam up faster than “How much does it cost?” We’re rather new to the market, so maybe I’m being completely naive, but this seems really strange — as if I walked up to a Ford dealer and they wouldn’t quote me a price on a new Focus. What gives? Are vendors charging each customer a different price? Is there some other reason this information is so closely guarded?
Regardless of the reason other vendors keep pricing secret, here’s our promise: We will always be clear, honest, and up-front about the prices of our products — Gimlet and all our future products. There won’t be any “Contact our Sales Team for a quote!” business (honestly, we don’t even have a sales team) — you’ll see the prices for our products published openly on our web site.
We think we make software that’s both excellent and an excellent value. But we really want you to decide that for yourself — and part of that is telling you up front what our software costs.
We think Gimlet is fantastic. But of course we would — we made it! So, it’d be great to hear what some other people have to say about it. Well, we can help you out.
And then, in The Charleston Advisor’s April 2011 issue, there’s a fabulous review of Gimlet. You’ll need a subscription to view the full article, but to quote the reviewer’s conclusion: “Gimlet is a great product for a great price.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
Still not totally convinced? Sign up and see for yourself — it’s free!
Hi! We’re Sidecar, the company behind Gimlet — the best library desk stats tool around.
Since launching in June 2009, we meant to post a Thank-You to our clients after you had answered 1,000 total questions in Gimlet. However, that milestone came a little earlier than we expected, and we missed it.
Next, we planned to do it after 10,000 questions. Again, other issues called to us, and the 10,000 question mark faded into the past. As did 20,000, and 30,000.
And then 50,000.
Finally, we realized: we can’t wait for an artificial milestone to thank our clients. So: at the time of this writing, librarians have used Gimlet to answer 58,512 questions. That’s amazing. (Actually, since starting this post, it’s now 58,526.) In fact, we’re seeing nearly a thousand questions recorded every single day.
So, thank you to everyone who has helped us make this possible. Keep it up!
You probably have many sites bookmarked in your browser — these bookmarks take you to all your favorite websites. A bookmarklet is just a browser bookmark, but instead of taking you to a URL, it runs a little piece of JavaScript to do something helpful. Our Gimlet bookmarklet pops open your library’s “Add question” form from anywhere you happen to be online.
Installing the Gimlet bookmarklet
Login to Gimlet and you’ll find your bookmarklet link at the bottom of the page. If you’re using Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome installing is as easy as dragging the “Save to Gimlet” link up to your browser bookmarks toolbar. If you use Internet Explorer, you can install it by right-clicking on the “Save to Gimlet” link and adding the bookmarklet to your Favorites.
Using the bookmarklet
Anytime you find yourself answering a question where a web page contains the answer, use the bookmarklet. You can highlight text on the web page with the answer and our bookmarklet will add the copied text, along with the title and URL of the web page to your “answer” field in the “Add question” form.
It’s really simple to use and we think it’s gonna save you loads of time. Give it a try and let us know what you think. We’re always open to new ideas or suggestions from our customers.
