All of the internal parts of Ping-O-Matic have been switched over to use the new functions I wrote, and I’ll be eliminating more of the old code in the next day or two, which should continue to improve performance.
Sorry for some of the bumps over the weekend, some of you may have caught me while the code was being debugged and seen strange messages or behaviour. As the first “hard part” is now over, these should be a lot less than they used to be.
Bloggers Are So Wrong About Media I’m interested in health and wellness. Where do I go to find the best blogs on this topic? Technorati? Even in the very unlikely event I’ve heard of Technorati (the name is so off putting), a search of Health and Wellness produces a list of random blog posts, including many in Asian languages. That is what vertical blog aggregation/news collection services are becoming so popular. Blogs and blogging were part of evolution of media 1.0, tags, aggregation and memeorandum are a notch above (web 2.0?). Blogs are not the end-all for traditional media, but I dislike the fact that doom-sayers look at a possible problem and never turn to look at possible solutions. Why can’t traditional media and popular dynamic media complement each other?
Gather.com - like eBay for Bloggers: Gather.com, positions itself as a kind of eBay for online writers and their readers — a gathering spot for musings and discussions on everything from wine and computers to fitness and spirituality. And, with a business model that could shake up the writing profession, executives from Gather Inc. are recruiting bloggers by offering them a share of the company’s advertising revenue. Slightly altered versions of this business model seems to have gathered quite a bit of steam recently.
I just (finally) found the lingering bug that would cause people to get a “you’re pinging too fast” when in fact they actually hadn’t been. It was related to how we stored the latest pings and how new blogs were added to the database.
So far I’ve removed about 400 lines from the code, and taking out more and more. After it’s been broken down to its simplest possible parts I’ll begin replicating it to the other servers.
Ping-O-Matic is running again, however the blog will now be here instead of on the pingomatic.com domain. (To make it easier to distribute the app amoung multiple servers and not have to keep so much synced.)
Sorry for the downtime, it was actually NOT related to the plans for a new architecture, the problem was the pings were overloading the network stack (really) on the old box, so we moved it to a better box and put some protections in front of it.
There will be more updates over the weekend, I’ll be blogging the news as it happens. The hardware from Technorati will finally be brought online and I have a few other optimizations in mind.
We have two new importers in the svn tree: Live Journal and dotclear. These will be in 2.0.1.
We’re fixing bugs in preparation for a 2.0.1 maintenance release. Watch the roadmap for bugfix activity. If you want to make sure your “favorite” 2.0 bug is fixed, join the testers list and download a nightly build.
Increasing AdSense Revenue on Forums: I can attest that not displaying ads on entry pages work better for the bottom line. I wish there were some further (publicly published) metrics on tweaking Adsense revenue. If there are links that are pertinent/experiences that work for people, please leave a comment.
Great interview of the guy running Hotmail, he talks a lot about the scaling of megaservices and some of the concerns of managing tens of thousands of boxes. What would you give to hear a similar interview by his counterpart at Google or Yahoo? Fascinating read.