The MyBlogLog Blog The source for all things MyBlogLog.

Reader Roll “Slowness” Fixed

Some of you may have noticed a slowdown in the Reader Roll and Top 5 widgets early this morning.  The slowdown was caused due to the failure of one of our "pub" servers.  The server is now back and an additional mirror server has been brought online to ensure that this does not happen again in the future.

Reader Roll “Slowness” Fixed

Some of you may have noticed a slowdown in the Reader Roll and Top 5 widgets early this morning.  The slowdown was caused due to the failure of one of our "pub" servers.  The server is now back and an additional mirror server has been brought online to ensure that this does not happen again in the future.

MySpace Reader Roll Issue

We have had a few people report that our
MySpace Reader Roll Widget was not showing up since we launched the
service earlier this week.  Well, we finally tracked down the issue
to a server failure.  One of the three initial servers providing the
MySpace Reader Roll went down without notifying our monitoring
system.  The server has been replaced and we should not see any
further outages.

A heads up on slow-loading images

It looks like Amazon is having some scaling issues with their S3 image hosting service.  They promise that this is a temporary thing and image loading should speed up shortly.

Extended Pro/Trail Memberships

The MyBlogLog team received an email on 17th of last month from a user saying that we had downgraded their membership from "Pro" to "Free" by mistake. Due to scheduling constraints, we simply switched the person back to Pro and turned off the automated downgrade system. We would rather give users extended Pro and Trial memberships than inadvertently downgrade anyone.

Well, we finally got around to tracking down the bug and have reactivated the system. As such, many of our Pro and Trial members received notification that their accounts were downgraded earlier today. A large group of users have already renewed their annual Pro memberships or signed-up for Pro subscription service since sending out the notices. Thanks!!

To those of you that have not yet setup/renewed your Pro membership, we wanted to ensure you that we will keep your complete stats history for an additional seven days from today to give you time to sign-up.

Context means everything

So the top 5 global links are down for a little bit while we sort out a longer-term solution for seemingly creepy pictures that are acceptable with more context.  We're not looking to arbitrarily censor sites and links (and our hats are off to the VAST majority of truly adult sites who mark themselves as such) but this is a case where it will simply cause too much confusion when people click the Top 5 links without knowing what the full scoop is.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Faulty hard drive blamed for weekend site outages (news at 11)

Over the weekend a hard drive on one of our database servers failed, causing a number of people to be unable to access their stats.  Since the server itself was running fine, we didn't receive any pages, so the problem occurred for nearly half the day.

First the bad news:  about a quarter of our users will find their stats significantly lower than usual for the weekend.  This is because during this outage (as well as a similar but less noticeable problem on Saturday) we were unable to capture stats for the affected server group's users.

Now for the good news: the timeouts worked perfectly and none of our users' sites were impacted at all.  Even though a key link in the tracking chain was broken, a spot check of several of our users showed that the failovers we've set up worked and no one experienced any slowdown.

As badges and widgets and plugins (oh my) continue to proliferate , sites are increasingly at the mercy of sites who provide bling for their page.  The services that want to last beyond 2006 need to recognize that they are a guest on their users' sites and need to behave accordingly.  As I write this, I realize I should write a longer post about this, so for now I'll just sign off by saying that we're very cognizant of our tenuous position on your pages and continue to improve our ability to deliver great functionality with a tiny footprint.

MyBlogLog reaches an important milestone — comment spam!

Some days I hate the internet.  Well, that's a lie.  I love the internet (thanks Al!) but I hate Doris Buka.  A number of you have received messages from Buka and I would ask you to disregard her message, or at least be aware that you were one of a hundred or so users that she spammed this morning.  As soon as one of the MyBlogLog tech team comes online, we'll mass delete the message and Doris will be but an unhappy memory.

We're also now discussing adding a captcha (Wikipedia: captcha) to the message pages.  We loathe the things, but they're still slightly better than comment spam.  Thanks for your patience and enjoy the weekend!

Blog Picture Uploads are working again

A number of people reported that they couldn't upload pictures using the image crop tool.  We've gotten that sorted and you are go for uploading shots of your blogs and web sites!