rpc.blogrolling.com undergoing maintenance

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:40:28 -0400

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.

Better, Faster, Stronger!

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:51:00 -0400

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.

A number of features reinstated

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:34:26 -0400

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.

Fixes coming steadily...

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:24:33 -0400

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.

Relaunch Update

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:29:51 -0500

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.

Where's Blogrolling?

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:35:04 -0500

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.

More about ads...

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:16:00 -0500

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...

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:44:00 -0500

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...

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:42:44 -0500

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).

The Skinny on BR2.0

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:59:00 -0500

In point form for maximum impact…

… BR2 will be released on March 2 (yayfinally!!)

…. all your old Blogrolls will be imported into the new system, you won’t need to change a thing.

… the system was recoded from scratch, from the ground up. This fixed a ton of old bugs (and probably introduced a ton of new ones)

… the “pay” option is back. All customers get all features, except Pay customers won’t see adverts in their links.

… “adverts in links” is our way of helping us pay for the cost of running blogrolling.com.

… it costs a lot to run blogrolling.com - last year alone we served over a billion blogrolls - that means a lot of bandwidth and a lot of gear. Without a way to recoup some of these costs, it is tough for us to properly invest in it.

… without proper investment, BR2 will fall into disrepair like BR1 did. I’d prefer to charge a little for BR2 so that we can build new features and improve the service, rather than just let it sit there.

Questions? I’m sure there are, please catch us @blogrolling on twitter.

More More on BR2

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:07:00 -0500

Hardware was installed and tested the week of January 5th as promised, now we’re just waiting on delivery of the final code. We ran into some UI issues and made a decision earlier this week to simply go with the old UI rather than try to jazz things up and protract the outage.

Our developers are working on the migration tools now to get your old data into the new system. With some luck, I’ll have a concrete relaunch date Friday coming, or possibly Monday at the latest.

Keep your fingers crossed with me, I will post more as soon as I get word back from the team.

More on BR2

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:15:32 -0500

Happy New Year loyal Blogrolling users (I figure you must be loyal if you are still reading these updates after waiting so long!)…

To recap the story thus far, Blogrolling.com was brutally hacked in late 2008. We decided to take most of the system offline to ensure that no customer data was compromised and that we could still continue to serve blogrolls, but without the capability to add or edit them.

As you know, we’ve been working with our development team to re-write every single line of code in the Blogrolling system new from scratch. During this same period, we’ve also been working on several other really important projects to help ensure that we can continue to pay the bills and keep the lights on for the Blogrolling project, which really is a labor of love for us (its been a free service for as long as I can remember). We love Blogrolling just as much as you do, but we’ve also had to make sure that we take care of our paying customers as well.

We’ve also been slightly slowed down over the last couple of weeks by the holidays. As of yesterday, the last of the major holidays are behind us, and we’re now back hard at work getting Blogrolling.com 2.0 ready for a public beta as quickly as we can. I will post another update next week after our next code review.

Thanks again for all your patient support. We really do appreciate it and will do our best to make sure that BR2 gets online as quickly as possible.

Development Update

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:12:43 -0500

Hi Everyone!

Sorry for the lack of updates. The development team has been hard at work on rebuilding Blogrolling.com and we’re gtting very close to a public release. The main user interfaces are code-complete, and we are working on tweaks to how the interfaces look and work. The hard work lies with re-building the Pinger and RPC infrastructure. We’ve made several changes to how things work, but we also need to guarantee backwards compatibility with the old services so that nothing on your end breaks when we go live. We have another code-review today.

In the meantime, thanks so much for all your patience and support. While updates have been few and far between, there has been no shortage of work going on. I know how frustrating that it has been for some of you not being able to update your blogrolls, but the end of the ‘rolling drought is near!

Thanks again for everything,

/ross

Whither Blogrolling 2.0?

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:41:00 -0500

Thursday is a big day at Blogrolling HQ. Thursday marks the end of our second development cycle (or “sprint” for the Agilists out there).

If everything looks good, we will quickly be in a position to launch a beta of Blogrolling 2.0 fairly quickly. If not, we might need one more cycle of iteration to get it ready for limited public use.

The team is doing awesome work and I’m really looking forward to being able to share it with you. You can count on another update sometime on Thursday.

How come so quiet?

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 13:10:44 -0500

Thanks to everyone for their patience while we sort this mess out.

The short story is that Blogrolling 1.0 is still mostly offline for security reasons. Serving blogrolls, pinging and a couple of other minor functions are back, but you still can’t edit your blogroll, create new blogrolls, that sort of thing.

This is killing us as much as you.

The service will continue to run in sub-standard mode while we work through the code re-write that I talked about last week. I’ve asked my team to see if we can bring back editing and adding to blogrolls while we work on Blogrolling 2.0, but it doesn’t look good at this point.

Sorry that I don’t have better or more detailed news at this point. I will post more about Blogrolling 2.0 once we get closer to the beta in a few weeks.

Thanks again for your patience and support.

/ross

Current state of affairs...

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:39:29 -0400

Its been a long week at Blogrolling HQ and while I can’t report that the good ship Blogrolling.com is seaworthy again, I did want to give you all an update before the weekend.

We got hit pretty hard by the forces of evil, so we had to restrict which functions were available via Blogrolling.com. For now, this includes most account and blogroll management features. No changing your passwords, updating your rolls, etc. In the meantime, we are still serving Blogrolls.

Behind the scenes, we’ve got a couple of parallel projects underway.

a) bringing back affected services safely and responsibly. We want to ensure that your data is safe, so we’re doing an extensive review of the affected services, making slight adjustments here and there, and restoring individual services. This won’t be a quick process, so don’t expect to see full functionality restored in the next few days. It may be up to a few weeks before basic services are fully restored. I realize how much this sucks, but we want to make sure that we don’t affect the overall security of the system and the basic dependability of core roll serving. Like I said earlier, we’re committed to keeping the lights on, but they will be dimmed for a little while.

b) Blogrolling 2.0. I had originally scheduled to launch this almost 2 years ago, but then I got involved in some other small projects for Tucows that sucked up 100% of my attention and 100% of the resources I had intended on using for BR2. In the meantime, BR1 kept chugging along, quietly growing and generally doing exactly what it promised to do. Despite this lack of attention, BR1 is *huge* - we served well over 1 billion blogrolls in the last year and have more than 6 times the number of users that we had when we first took the service over wayyy back.

BR2 is intended to be a smaller, simpler version of BR1. You will see a couple of important features improved and a couple of unused features disappear. You will also see a business model attached to BR2. I’ll provide more details closer to launch, but I want to get this out in the open now. It was fine to let BR1 run without a model because we weren’t making a strong investment in it (bandwidth has been our biggest cost over the last three years). Now that we’ve got people assigned to it, the costs have skyrocketed and in the current financial environment, corporate patience for digging big Web 2.0 holes and filling them up with someone else’s money is non-existent. Every dollar that we spend needs to have some ROI attached to it. You have my promise that we’re not going to ruin your Blogrolls with flash ads or something equally stupid - we will be sensitive about how we approach this and we will look for your feedback before pulling the trigger. I will not be party to implementing the business model that killed Blogrolling, rather - I’d love to be part of the community that helped turn it into a shining success.

If you have any comments, just send us a note via twitter to @blogrolling. I’ll be implementing Disqus here as soon as I get a few spare moments to hack it into the template.

Have a great weekend everyone.

/ross

The story thus far...

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:50:00 -0400

Earlier yesterday, we had to take Blogrolling.com entirely offline. Shortly thereafter, we re-started serving blogrolls, but we still haven’t made tools available to manage your blogrolls, set up new ones, sign up for the service, etc. For a while, we were redirecting the Blogrolling home page to our Twitter status page so that we could provide everyone with updates. Now we’re just going to post updates here as they happen. Of course, we’ll continue to monitor Twitter, etc. to provide help, answers, etc.

Drop us a note @blogrolling on twitter if you have any questions.

We’re really sorry for any inconvenience that this has caused, but it is really important that we run with the lights dim while we sort things out.

Blogrolling News & Status

BlogRolling Maintenance Complete

rpc.blogrolling.com undergoing maintenance

Better, Faster, Stronger!

A number of features reinstated

Fixes coming steadily...

Relaunch Update

Where's Blogrolling?

More about ads...

A prototype of the new Blogrolling 2.0 advertising unit. When...

A prototype of the new Blogrolling 2.0 advertising unit. When...

The Skinny on BR2.0

More More on BR2

More on BR2

Development Update

Whither Blogrolling 2.0?

How come so quiet?

Current state of affairs...

The story thus far...