Saturday, August 08, 2009

Footnote's 1930 Census for the month of August

I've been behind in getting out a lot of genealogy information while I was on vacation and then recovering from vacation. One thing I planned of blogging about was the fantastic offer from Footnote - free access to the 1930 U.S. Federal Census for the month of August.

To get to the census for free, you have to go through the promotional page at http://go.footnote.com/1930census. Going through this page allows Footnote to place a cookie that gives you special access to the 1930. Once you’ve got that cookie, as long as you are on the site, you should be able to search from anywhere on the site and get into the 1930 census free. If you close the browser and come back, you’ll need to go back to the 1930 promotion page again.

I was just reading on the Footnote blog an update on how the promotion is running. It appears the first day or so when people tried to print a page they would get a message that they needed to sign up in order to do so. Well, that was an error and its been fixed.

Now it appears that so many people are trying to access the free census that they are overwhelming the servers. Things are becoming slow, frustrating, error prone and opposite of what the Footnote experience should be.

Footnotes response is:
"We are doing what we can to improve the experience and will be upgrading our systems to handle more visitors, but this will take some time. In the mean time, we expect that as the initial excitement dies down (or is dampened by the slowness of the site), things will improve.

If we can’t get things stabilized in the next few days, we will postpone the free 1930 offer until the systems are ready to handle it. We hope we don’t have to do that, but we want you to be able to use the census while it’s free and we need to be sure that we provide a quality experience for our current paying members.

We’ll post additional updates about the status of the traffic problems here on the blog."
I sure hope things clear up. I haven't even gotten on the site yet!

See ya tomorrow, for tomorrow is always another genealogy day!

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