It’s been a beautiful Spring here in the Philadelphia area. I’ve taken a few evenings off from Funtober over the past two weeks in order to enjoy the weather, the NCAA tournament, and some time with the family. But as I learned last year, Spring quickly turns into Summer and Summer turns into Fall. Farmers will soon be in the fields planting corn. And so it is time to get back to work, as well as start blogging again.

It’s been three months since I’ve posted on the Funtober blog. I’m sure it has appeared that Funtober has been in hibernation to some. But I’ve actually been hard at work behind the scenes setting the stage for this Fall. It was really just a short blog hibernation in order to allow me to get some other work done. Here’s some of the improvements that we’ve made since posting here last:

Funtober Costume Store Updates

There have been a number of upgrades to our eCommerce store, one of which removed the nasty error that some people were experiencing that prevented them from checking out with a costume in their shopping cart. It was super frustrating because the checkout process worked correctly for so many people, including myself. I tore the system apart in February and permanently fixed the problem.

Costume Store Payment Options:

Last year we only took credit cards – Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express. We’ve added Paypal to your purchasing options. A number of people asked for an alternative method of payment. So we listened!

Costume Selection:

Last year, we had about 750 costumes available for sale in October. We’ve doubled that number now. It’s over 1500 and growing. If you remember back to last October, you had to wade through all of the costume options by age/gender in order to find the costume that you wanted. We’ve now got this nice page listing (almost) all of our Halloween costumes by subject. We’re going to improve these pages more as Halloween draws near.

Better Server: We’ve upgraded the platform to serve web pages to you faster. It should prove more stable under the high traffic loads that we experience during September and October. The minor downtime that happened last year during September and October should be a thing of the past. We will be testing this further as the year progresses to ensure all goes smoothly.

Another Person: When I wrote the About Funtober page last year, I used a lot of “I” because this was a one person show. But that’s not the case now. I managed to convince someone else that Funtober had a pretty good chance at success. It’s going to take him some time to get up to speed on everything, but I’m sure you’ll see him posting here on the blog soon. If you notice an improvement in our Haunted House section, that’s all him.

Oktoberfest:

I removed all of the 2012 dates to Oktoberfest events and put in 2013 dates where I could find them. Three people emailed in March asking when I would have 2013 dates. So I made it a priority. We’ll be going through this list another couple times before things heat up in September.

Ghost Tours:

We went through all the ghost tours and created a brief description of them for you.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some big things. There’s been hundreds of minor changes over the past few months as part of our efforts to build the best resource for Fall fun that we can. We’ve come a long way with Funtober since day one. We passed the one year anniversary of this website a few weeks back. About 55 weeks ago, I was setting up my first server. And loading the first 100 pages of the website into Funtober. Seems like forever ago.

Feedback From You

If there’s something that we can do better, tell us! If there’s a feature that you would find helpful, we’d be happy to implement it. If there’s information that you would like, we’ll go get it. It’s hard to guess what you’ll like – so leave a comment, hit up our contact page, tweet at us or send me an email. We only bite in October.

I woke up this morning to discover that the file system on the Funtober server was corrupted. If I had implemented a proper daily backup system of the entire server, I would simply reinstall yesterday’s server backup. But I’ve only been backing up the website files and database rather than the entire server. So I will be spending the upcoming holiday reconfiguring the server here.

It’s a temporary setback, but I’m hoping that it will alleviate the recurring problem that caused the corrupt file system in the first place. In that case, any other solution would just be a temporary fix. And I expect that you will be celebrating the New Year rather than shopping for costumes, anyway. If you are here looking for a costume, I’m sorry! I should have it fixed and running by January 2, 2013.

I hope you are enjoying your holidays and I look forward to helping you find costumes and fall fun in 2013!

In September, Funtober was selected as Philadelphia Startup Digest‘s first Startup of the Week. As part of that honor, I’ll be the first entrepreneur at the weekly Meet the Founders series they are cosponsoring with Benjamin’s Desk, a shared office and coworking space in Philadelphia. So, if you would like to meet me and learn about Funtober, stop by Benjamin’s Desk on Monday, November 26th from 4 to 6 pm. It’s located on the 7th Floor of 1701 Walnut in Center City Philadelphia.

I’m excited to speak publicly about Funtober for the first time. I’m looking forward to showing off what I’ve built. And I’ll be prepared to discuss every aspect of the company in depth. So stop by and say hello. Listen to me articulate my vision and reminisce about the past year. Ask questions. Offer feedback. Make fun of my wordpress theme. Help me with my elevator pitch. And network.

If you plan to attend, and there is something that you want to make sure that I cover, feel free to contact me or leave a comment. And if you can’t make it, but would like to offer a suggestion for Funtober, I’d love to hear it.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving! I hope to see you all on Monday.

I owe a big thank you to a number of people that made Funtober possible this year. Sarah Ehman, Kris DeGraeve and Megan Applegate shared some fantastic craft tutorials and recipes on the Funtober blog. It would have been a pretty quiet blog without them. The costume store couldn’t have happened without my parents. They pitched in when I wasn’t sure that I had enough time to build it. The website also couldn’t have come together without the support of my friends, who put up with me talking about Funtober in every conversation for the past six months. It wouldn’t have stayed online without the patience of the customer service folks at my hosting company, who tolerated my lack of server administration skills whenever Funtober went down. And I wouldn’t have been inspired to build it without the efforts of a number of people that I follow online. They probably don’t even know my name but they were instrumental in getting me this far.

Most of all, I have to thank you. And everyone else that visited Funtober this Fall. A double thank you goes out to everyone that ordered a Halloween costume, entered our costume giveaway, discovered an error in a directory, submitted an event that I missed, emailed to say that they found the website valuable, took the time to share Funtober with their friends, or did something else that I have forgotten to include here. You especially rock for helping make Funtober a success.

I’ve spent much of the past two weeks thinking about the future of Funtober. There’s a lot to do here before next Fall. Probably too much, in fact. I’d like to expand from handling events in October to the rest of Fall. Everything from Labor Day to Thanksgiving, in other words. That’s probably too much for one person to handle successfully. Hopefully I’ll get some help along the way.

I’d like to help people who love Fall and Halloween connect with each other. So I have been testing a few different ways to add some social networking features to the website. It seemed like visitors enjoyed the food and crafts – so I’ll have to have more tutorials next year.

I was asked a number of times during October whether I was planning to keep the costume store open year round or whether it would only be open during the Fall. The short answer: The costume store will be open year round. I’ve added a number of costumes for Thanksgiving and Christmas over the past week. But don’t worry – the focus here at Funtober will remain on the Fall.

As I’m sure you can tell from the prior paragraphs, my personal list of ideas for improvements for Funtober is pretty long. Even though a lot went right this year, there is still a lot of room for improvement. I’d love to hear your suggestions and feedback about Funtober. They would definitely help me add to, prioritize, and focus my list. Feel free to use the comment form below if you want your comments being displayed publicly or the contact form if you would like to keep them a bit more private.