ArticlesUPDATE: This turned out to be an unexplained problem at my end. See more at bottom.
I want to look at the SmugMug API documentation.
I am confident that it is fine, but I just need to be sure there are no FaceBook-like restrictions on what can be exported, that there is a Python wrapper, and there are no other surprises.
I am having a problem with their site. It isn’t responding!
http://smugmug.com and http://smugmug.com/hack both timeout for me, consistently, for the last 18 hours.
Randomly-selected SmugMug-hosted albums (available on subdomains) are working fine.
The problem isn’t my browser, because I tried on IE7, Firefox and Chrome, with the same results.
The problem isn’t that the site is down, because when I use Proxify to hide who I am, it connects fine!
The problem isn’t my configuration because, in those immortal words of confused users everywhere, I didn’t change anything.
I don’t think the problem is that I am looking at a different web-server server to other people, through DNS magic. My nslookup and an online nslookup provide the same IP address.
I am coming to the rather paranoid conclusion that my IP address is being deliberately blocked! I haven’t been doing anything untoward, so if I am, it is for crimes I didn’t commit. It was the one-armed man!
Perhaps there is a more plausible explanation… anyone?
Whether or not it is true, the idea that it could be true is making me nervous about third-party hosts galleries!
UPDATE: I updated my router firmware and rebooted it. Problem went away. Firmware bug? Cache corruption? Dunno. Sorry SmugMug!
Comment by Don MacAskill on December 6, 2008
Hey Julian,
I’m the CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug and I’m as baffled as you are. We aren’t blocking your IP that I know of (we aren’t blocking *any* IPs that I know of!). Would you mind emailing me so we can get more details and dig in?
Comment by Julian on December 6, 2008
So, I was chatting to an old colleague last night about what happens when there are problems in a system set-up for a customer. We were discussing how, if the problems are dealt with right, you can actually get more customer satisfaction than before the problems occurred.
This seems to illustrate that. The problem was almost certainly in my router, not in the SmugMug system. (I re-iterate, I didn’t change anything! I hadn’t touched my router configuration for many, many months, possibly over a year. It was the one-armed man, I swear!)
Yet, I got a response from the CEO to my random blog post within 35 minutes. I am surprised it even made it to Google in that time!
I have written to Don MacAskill, thanking him for his quick response and apologising for the inconvenience. (I also explained why I didn’t start with SmugMug technical support, rather than a public blog post; because I couldn’t get to it!)
+1 to SmugMug.
Comment by Don MacAskill on December 6, 2008
Hey Julian,
Great news! We didn’t change anything over here (we were ready to, if necessary, but didn’t have enough information to go on yet), so I guess it’s just one of those things. 🙂
Holler if it returns and we can help!