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I've been whiling away a little time playing with beads.

I am getting concerned about Etsy. Apart fromt he fact that I haven't sold anything yet (not a whinge, the whinge is coming though!) I am worried about the future of the site itself. On the last week there has been a huge amount of down time while the backroom boffins did some boffining, and then some more, and then tried to fix the boffining that had already happened. It seems to be working OK at the moment...

I hadn't bothered reading the Etsy forums up till now, being a bit busy with other things, but cast a glance at them while all of this was going on. There was a mixture of people grumping that this was no way to run a business (it isn't), but far more people praising the boffins and stroking their egos and saying that everyone else should shut up and let them get on and play with their software.

I;m not going to get into that argument (much) and haven;t posted on the forums. But it makes me think, with a shudder, of Themestream, a pay-per-click creative writing site that I had the misfortune to become heavily embroiled with several years ago. Exactly the same things happened - they expanded far too quickly, didn't put enough of their (considerable) profits into keeping the site up with the traffic and the punters, and crashed in a blaze of - what is the opposite of glory? - owing thousands of people like me money.

I know that Etsy can't screw me of money - especially if I don't sell anything! But if I do, the money comes straight to me via Paypal. But it just has the same smell of death about it. I really want it to succeed - I like the philosophy of the site - I;d like it more if I could sell something, but that's probably got more to do with my photographs or merchandise than anything else. But it worries me none the less.

Rant over. I have schoolwork to do - actual textile art! Not just writing business plans!