An End to Our Winter Hibernation Here on the Funtober Blog

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.

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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.