The rpc.blogrolling.com servers have now been successfully upgraded! All blog pings are again being processed and updated without delay.
We are currently upgrading the database and web servers that display your BlogRolls. This will speed things up even more. We are taking care to not cause interuption to service as we do this. You may notice a slight delay of ping updates for the next hour as we upgrade each server.
We hear what you’re asking for and we’ve made a bunch of fixes. As with all online projects, it’s a work in progress, so we’ll continue to roll out improvements.
Some of the fixes that you may notice include:
Faster editing and displaying for your BlogRolls
The UI on www.BlogRolling.com is noticeably faster. We’ve improved the speed for adding links to your BlogRolls and we continue to work on the overall site speed. Stay tuned.
Fixed blank pages issue for your BlogRolls
The blank pages issue was actually a time-out problem. It should be fixed with the speed improvements mentioned above.
RSS feed improvements
We heard your complaints about non-standard RSS feeds. This issue should be fixed. If you are still seeing any RSS issues, drop us a line.
Sorry for the lack of updates! We’ve been setting up monitoring for the system internally here, and are still stabilizing.
Last week we re-introduced some of the missing features including:
- alphabetical order option for displaying blogrolls
- 2 of the sorting tricks options weren’t working
- append and prepend text or image to recently updated link
- ability to limit total number of links
- image to url translation feature
- timestamp in url title for recently updated links
You may have noticed these features started working, and sometimes stopped working this week.
Due to this, we’ve also made the database even faster, to support some of the blogrolls that make use of all these features. These features are now back, and are here to stay.
Just a quick word to let you all know that we’ve fixed a number of open bugs in the past couple of days. Target “_” are working again, a number of DB optimizations have gone into place and we’ve fixed 90% of the integration issues with the Paypal API (i.e. if you’ve paid, your account has been upgraded, even if you saw errors).
Right now, we’re focused on bringing back the BlogrollThis bookmarklet, making the redirect/ad URLs more readable and passing along more informative information in the referrer variables (if all goes well, expect a nice surprise in this function).
As always, if you’ve got questions, send us a note on twitter @blogrolling.
Hi All -
The team has fixed the firewall issues and re-optimized all of the database reads - system performance has increased almost five fold since we started this work yesterday. They are now working into the night to optimize database writes. They expect to be done late this evening and are now targetting tomorrow morning for the full relaunch.
More to come as it happens.
The short story is that the team is burning the midnight oil to get BR2 launched and live.
The longer story is that we went live earlier this evening, but we saw some questionable performance characteristics that we weren’t happy with, so decided to rollback and regroup to allow the team some extra breathing room. They are currently working on optimizing a few aspects of the system so that BR2 can better handle the massive load that serving all of your blogrolls requires (we’re serving more than a billion of your blogrolls each year! that requires tons of horsepower…)
I don’t have an ETA to pass along at this point, but we’re not expecting this to take forever. The team needs sleep, so I’m expecting this all to be resolved tomorrow at some point, but hopefully, sooner.
If you have questions, drop us a note on Twitter @blogrolling.
A few of you have asked for more information about the new advertising model that we will be launching on Monday to coincide with the release of Blogrolling 2.0.
The purpose of these ads is to attempt to create a semi-sustainable business model around Blogrolling to ensure that Tucows can continue to invest in the ongoing development and maintenance of Blogrolling.
Blogrolling.com serves well over a billion blogrolls per year to tens of thousands of customers, across hundreds of thousands of blogs. It requires some fairly serious bandwidth and hardware just to keep it running. We think it deserves more than just “keep it running” and with a sustainable business model around it, I believe we can fully realize the potential of this awesome service. Blogrolling.com was one of the original blog “widget” services, and even with the recent challenges, still probably one of the largest in terms of actual usage. We really want to make sure that it gets even better.
So, we’re going to try and sell some ads.
The idea isn’t new, but we never did anything with it because we never really felt comfortable with just “sticking ads on your blog”.
Last summer, we started toying with the notion of “what if we put ads on the sites that are in the blogrolls?” i.e. positioning some sort of ad unit on the target page of the website you include in your blogrolls. We started experimenting with the idea and quickly got excited about the possibilities. We quickly decided that the best way to implement this was to give our blogrollers the capability to determine whether or not their links would spawn ads or not. We also determined that we needed to make it easy for the ad viewer to turn off the ad.
This is the vision that you see instantiated in these screen shots.
The screenshots that we posted earlier show the target page with a small banner at the top of the page that includes an unobtrusive text link, the advertising, and some navigation aids that allow the view to shut off the advertising. What isn’t pictured here is the feature that we implemented in your Blogrolling.com control panel to turn these ads off. There is a fee for turning off advertisements - $20 per year. All other Blogrolling.com features will continue to be free.
With thought this was a fair trade. If you want to use Blogrolling.com, but not pay, then we need to make a little bit of money from the traffic to your links. If you want to use Blogrolling.com and don’t mind paying for the features, then there’s no reason for us to try and make any money from the traffic to your links.
I hope this outline provides you with a better idea of the features that we’re releasing on Monday, how the advertising/subscription model works and some of our motivation for structuring things this way. Of course, if you have any questions, please let us know - we’re on twitter @blogrolling and love to hear from our customers.
(btw, we’re introducing a couple of new features on Monday that will make it much easier to get in touch with us as well…)
A prototype of the new Blogrolling 2.0 advertising unit. When someone clicks on a link in your blogroll, the page that you link to will have a small advertisement at the top of the page. This screen capture shows the advertising unit, and the target blog, immediately after the user has clicked through to the target blog. The advertisement is the small gray bar at the top of the page with the small text link labelled “Watch Butterscotch” (the actual advertising).
A prototype of the new Blogrolling 2.0 advertising unit. When someone clicks on a link in your blogroll, the page that you link to will have a small advertisement at the top of the page. This screen capture shows the advertising unit, and the target blog, as the user scrolls down the page. The advertisement is the small gray bar at the top of the page with the small text link labelled “Watch Butterscotch” (the actual advertising).
