The Kitchen

We recently had an issue with some people receiving the wrong orders because of packing slip mix-ups. Given that our packing slips identifiers consisted of nothing but strings of numbers, which sometimes differed from each other by just one digit, this was understandable.

To correct this issue, we're now switching to packing slip id's that take the form of the customer's last name, plus the last 3 digits of the order number to distinguish between 2 (or more) Smith's who order on one day. Hopefully this will reduce the incidence of shipping errors.

We recently launched a "Trial Size Box" program which let you order a single box of pasta or crackers. Unfortunately, we ran into some issues with duplicate shipments, and had to take it down just a few days after it went up. We're working to resolve those issues and should have it running again later this week. Thanks for your patience.

It was recently brought to my attention that the menu's on our site weren't working in IE8. We had tested it in early versions of IE, and in Firefox, and they worked fine, but surprisingly IE8 broke Microsoft's own ASP.NET Menu Control (unless it's in Compatability Mode, but that's basically the same as earlier versions of IE and very kludgy).

Fortunately, I found that Microsoft was aware of the issue and had even issued a patch for it. Unfortunately, our webhosting provider hadn't applied it at the time. I contacted them and we went back and forth for a bit (first they denied the menu's were broken; then they said they were broken, but it was clearly our fault; and finally they patched it, but insisted it was still broken on our site!). After some testing on different computers, it looks to me like it's working just fine. Please let me know if you run into any problems.

In addition to our new Trial-Size Box, here's another easy way to tell if you're going to like a product you see on our website but haven't tried yet: take someone else's word for it

Studies have shown that the best way to find out whether a certain choice will make you, personally, happy is to get the opinion of other people who have made the same choice. If they liked their choice, chances are you will, too.

With that in mind, you might want to check out our page of Raves & Reviews, featuring what other people and websites have said about our products. All the Reviews contain links back to the original website which reviewed us* (most recently, some kind words from Healthful Bites). So check them out, and happy snacking!

* I only mention that because I knew someone whose job was composing fake customer reviews for a website she worked for. Shocking, I know.

FiberGourmet is running its biggest sale of the year! Here's the story:

A few months ago I met an incredible woman, B. She’s beautiful, intelligent, warm – I could go on forever, but the important thing is that I fell in love with her. Last week I asked her for her hand in marriage and, wonder of wonders, she said yes. This put me in such a euphoric mood that I wanted to share it with all of our customers in the form of a huge sale on FiberGourmet’s entire line of reduced-calorie, high-fiber products.

To take advantage of the discount, simply go to our website and enter the coupon code SheSaidYes at checkout to save 15% on your our order! But hurry, the “honeymoon” for this sale ends on Thursday night at 11:59 PM.

Euphorically yours,
Ari
VP, FiberGourmet

P.S: You can congratulate the bride by signing our guestbook.

I got a nice package in the mail today from Maressa at First Magazine. Looks like our Mac & Cheese was featured in this month's issue - go pick up a copy at your local supermarket! And I'm referring to both the magazine and the mac & cheese.

It was serendipitious timing, since we recently re-vamped our site layout to feature both the magazine reviews and submitted recipes more prominently.

Oh, and on that note, stay tuned for the announcement of the winner of our penne recipe contest later tonight!

P.S: If you're puzzled by the title to this entry, congratulations on avoiding one of the sillier Slashdot memes. ;)

Our offices will be closed from April 8 - April 16 for inventory and a staff vacation. Since we won't be shipping during that time, we're offering a 15% discount on all orders placed before then, using the coupon-code: VACATION15

I'd completely forgotten about this YouTube page we put up a few months ago. We set it up primarily as a reference for people in our shipping department, so they could see how the boxes should be assembled and taped together.

The videos are kind of out of date, now, as we've introduced several new box shapes and are phasing out some of the older ones. It's still an interesting curiousity for the curious, and lives up to our tagline of going behind the scenes at our company. In the future I'll try to post some more videos, perhaps of a promotional or educational nature. So go subscribe!

By popular request, we're now giving people who order the back-ordered mac & cheese some more choices. If you order the mac & cheese together with some other items, you now have the option of shipping the back ordered items separately. This is the check-box you're looking for:

When you select it, we'll ship your other in-stock items right away, and will send the mac & cheese separately as soon as its available. Because of the extra shipping fees, we do charge $6 for this service.

If you don't check the box, all of your items will ship later, together with the mac & cheese, in March. The latter had been the default before now, but now we're giving you the option to get it sooner. Enjoy!

Macintosh operating system, that is.

We've been getting occasional reports of our BYOB page not working for our Apple users. A perusal of our server logs revealed hat the BYOB data from users with an Apple OS specified in their "user-agent string" (the field which tells us, among other things, what OS a web-request came from) was coming in truncated, with most of the BYOB items cut out.

We're mostly a Windows-shop, still running everything from 2000 to Vista for testing (we finally dumped 98, although I think I have an installed disk image somewhere to stick on an emulator if the need ever arises), plus a Linux distro or two, but no Macs yet.

However, I found that Apple offers a free version of their Safari browser, for Windows as well. Figuring the code base would be pretty similar, I downloaded, installed, and pointed it to our BYOB page. To my delight, it was broken! This was a good thing, because it meant I could test various fixes with some confidence that I was even solving the right problem.

Returning to the BYOB data, I noticed that the truncation seemed to occur right before the comma I was using as a field separator in the cookie. A little poking around revealed that there is no formal spec on URL encoding for cookie data, just a few de facto rules. Well, it seems that while Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Firefox followed one set of rules, Apple decided to "think differently" ;).

Fortunately, the .NET Framework makes it easy to implement URL encoding/decoding, with two simple calls in the HTTPUtility class. I threw those in and, lo and behold, it worked on Safari (on Windows). I also later spoke with another Apple user, who tried our site and was able to do a BYOB order, as well.

So, if you're an Apple user, you can now Build Your Own Box on our website. Congrats!