Natalie Zee over at the Make blog wrote about the new widget. Thanks Natalie!

We had a bit of a service outage tonight due, in part, to two main factors. First, the server went offline, leaving Swap-bot unreachable for about 30 minutes. Once the server was fixed, I discovered that the database was corrupted and needed to be repaired (don’t worry, no data was lost). This whole process took about 90 minutes to fix. Sorry for the outage.

Got a Mac? Get our widget!

With the swap-bot recent swaps widget, you’ll be the first to know when new swaps are added to swap-bot!

Swap-bot has a MySpace account. Be our friend.

wap-bot needs a rating system. I am thinking of trying something based on Yahoo’s Rating an Object design pattern.

I envision a system that somehow shows you the name of of your swap partner after you receive your item and allows you to rate the swapper. The rating would take the following into account:

• quality of swapped item
• the swappers ability to swap on-time
• what else?

This rating could then be used to allow people into or deny people from entering a swap. The swap creator could specify a rating of at least 3.5 (or any value) to enter the swap. I would think that the rating limit would apply to anyone with at least three swaps under their belt (eg: less than three swaps and the rating does not apply to them, they automatically get into the swap). All ratings would have to be public and some sort of appeals process would need to be in place.

The only question I really have is: at what point can the ratings begin? Since we have to reveal the name of the person you are rating, at which point in the swap process do you want to see the name. We’ve discussed before that you should see this name after 30 days, but is this too long after the swap to start rating?

Ideas and feedback please.

Swap photo galleries have now been added in their first phase. For an example of the galleries, see the leftover craft item swap.

I’ll take suggestions on how I can improve the galleries. I have a few more ideas myself, but know with your help they will be even better.

We had four new swaps created today. So far, that is a swap-bot record.

If you log into Swap-bot you won’t really notice anything different (I hope), but I reworked some of the CSS that is responsible for the positioning of the site. Please check it out and if you notice anything not quite working right, please let me know. I tried to make the site more accessible for swappers with an 800×600 screen resolution (about 12% of pageviews).

For anyone interested in CSS, I followed the 3 column example at Mollio.

International addresses no longer need to fill out the special textarea for their address. I added a country field and removed restrictions on a few other fields. If you have a non-US address or are skilled at sending things overseas, please take a look at the new address requirements and send me any feedback.

I am halfway done with the member profile pages. If you log into Swap-bot, click ‘Manage Account’ and scroll to the bottom of your account information, you will see a revamped info section. Fill out whatever information suits you. Soon (tonight or tomorrow sometime) the first pass at the member pages will be up. Hopefully the member pages will be used by swap partners to learn m

ore about the other participants to know exactly what to send.

You will be able to get to others’ member pages by clicking on their names in the ‘View Participants’ section under a swap. These pages will be publicly accessible (meaning that you don’t have to be logged in to view them), so you can post the URL to your profile on your blog or anywhere else you want.

Take a look at what is already available. What else would you like to enter/know about your swap partners?