Annnnyhow, if you get our weekly emails, follow us on Twitter or “like” us on Facebook, you know this already, but I’m super pumped about it, so I figured I’d mention it again.  We have a new instructional writer and her name is Jennifer Barretta.

I know some of you are wondering why an ecommerce site would bother having not one, not two but three writers churning out instructional articles.  That’s for content sites, right?  Well, yes and no.  It is true that typically you’d find these sorts of articles on a content site, but for us it’s all about keeping our customers happy and giving them what they want.

Our customers have told us over and over how much they enjoy the free instructional articles and we’re all about making our customers happy, so rather than just sit back and be satisfied with two columns, we added a third.

As to why we chose Jen, not only is she one of the top female pool players in the US, but she’s also a solid writer and pretty damn funny.  Since we now have 3 writers, we’re going to be releasing a new article every week (assuming everyone hits their deadlines of course).  Jen’s article “Thoughts from the Electric Chair” was today’s article, next week Samm will be publishing her new article, Liz Ford the following week, you get the picture.

So as long as you all keep telling us you like the articles, we’ll keep them coming.  Just like this blog though, we need your feedback.  Tell us what you like about the articles.  Tell us what you want Samm, Liz and Jen to write about.  Your feedback is what

Needless to say, when I saw this I was tickled all sorts of pink.  When one of the top industry magazines says you’re the best, it really does mean a lot.  We work extremely hard over here to create a shopping experience that is more than just a site that sells pool cues.  We do what we can to inject some personality into our site with our silly mascot, team bios and my own weekly attempts at humor via the slightly absurd and snarky promotional emails we send out to our customers and we’re always looking for new ways to improve the overall shopping experience.

In addition to thanking Billiards Digest, I also wanted to thank all of our customers.  It is the feedback we receive from you all that push us to continually improve our website experience, our branding efforts and our customer service.

Simply put, without our customers PoolDawg wouldn’t exist.  So from all of us here at The Dawg, thank you for your continued support, patronage and feedback.  Keep telling us what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong and we’ll do our best to live up to the title that’s been bestowed upon us!

It was quite an interesting day yesterday at PoolDawg’s worldwide headquarters.  I was roused out of a peaceful slumber early yesterday morning by an automated text saying the PoolDawg’s servers were down.  After a little research, we were able to determine that our host, the powerful Amazon EC2 Cloud service, had what the press is referring to as “a hiccup“.

Like many online companies, PoolDawg is hosted in what is commonly referred to as a cloud server environment.  Among the folks that live in our cloud are Reddit, Quora, Foursquare, Hootsuite and a ton of other companies.  The reasons to do it are scalability, reliability and it is much more affordable than some of the other hosting options that provide 99.95% uptime.  This of course is the irony of the story, as the cloud went down making our site unreachable for a good part of the day yesterday.

Needless to say, our technology partners at Acumium were able to get us back up and running without any loss of data.  That said, I’d like to apologize to all of our loyal customers who weren’t able to get anything more than a system maintenance page yesterday.  We’re already in the process of looking at options to put redundancy in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Thank you to everyone for your patience yesterday.  If anyone has any questions about this, feel free to email me directly at mike[at]pooldawg.com or just give us a call at 866-843-3294.

“We are once again thrilled to be working with the WPBA,” said Michael Feiman, PoolDawg’s President. “Over the past several years we have worked with the WPBA in various ways from a promotional perspective. The Classic Tour continues to be an important vehicle for us as it gives us the opportunity to put our brand in front of hundreds of thousands of pool and billiards fans. It also gives us the ability to align our brand with some of the world’s best pool players. Pros the likes of Jeanette Lee, Allison Fisher and Karen Corr have become household names for billiards enthusiasts everywhere and we are proud to have our name mentioned in conjunction with these world class athletes.”

Televised coverage of the 2011 WPBA Classic Tour is scheduled to kick off March 20th with the 2011 WPBA Masters in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan and will feature perennial top ranked players Monica Webb, Kelly Fisher, Karen Corr and 2010 points champion Jasmin Ouschan.

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Thursday, Dec. 23: Office Closes at 3PM MST
Friday, Dec. 24: Office is closed so our PoolDawgers can get their Christmas on
Dec. 27 to Dec 30: Back in the office with regular hours
Friday, Dec 31: Office is closed for New Year’s Eve
Monday, Jan 3: Back in the office with regular hours, fully recharged and ready to rock 2011!

Thank you to all of our customers for a fantastic 2010 and we’ll look forward to loyally serving you all in 2011!