This morning, we announced the Bloglines Mozilla Toolkit. I’ve been playing with a development version of this for the past couple of weeks, and I think it’s fantastic. The toolkit extends Mozilla, embedding a Bloglines notifier into it, and adding several features to the right-click menu. Some of the things it makes easy to do:

• Find references for the page you’re viewing
• Find references to a link within the page you’re viewing
• Search for a term by just highlighting it
• Subscribe to the page you’re viewing (like the easy subscribe bookmarklet)

It really makes Mozilla even more useful. The toolkit was developed by Bloglines user Chad Everett and he did a great job. We have an amazing group of users.

Two things you need to worry about when running a server cluster are power and heat. Machines today may be small, but they put out a lot of heat and they suck up a lot of power. Many colocation centers (places where you keep your servers), weren’t designed for handling a lot of small servers that generate a lot of heat. This means, for example, that with Bloglines we can’t completely fill an entire rack at the colocation center with thin servers. The cooling system at the colo wasn’t designed for that kind of heat density. How can you tell if you do have a heat problem? Modern machines have temperature sensors on the CPU and sometimes on the motherboard, which you can (with some difficulty unfortunately) access through the operating system. You can set triggers which shut down machines if the temperature increases past a certain point. That will hopefully prevent the CPU from being fried. CPUs aren’t the only things affected by heat, of course. What may not be obvious is that you also need to worry about hard drives, which can be very sensitive to heat. If you find yourself with hard drive failures, you should seriously investigate whether you have a heat problem. About a month ago, a drive on a backup Bloglines database machine failed. That immediately raised a red flag about heat. Of course when dealing with a large number of hard drives, you’re going to have a failure every once in awhile. We haven’t had any failures since, but if we had, we would have looked at making adjustments to lower the temperature around the machines.

This morning we introduced a new Bloglines feature. If another feed has linked to an item that you’re reading, there will be a ‘References’ link under the item with a count of the number of references to that item. Clicking on that will bring up a list of all the items from other feeds that have linked to the item you’re reading. It’s a great way to follow conversations and see different viewpoints. This is another feature based on the link database work that we’ve been doing over the past two months.

Tom Biro of The Media Drop has posted an interview he did with me recently. He asked some great questions, and it was a pleasure to do the interview. I talk about Bloglines and some of my earlier experiences. Thanks Tom!

I learned a lot of things during the tech bubble of the 1990s. One of the more interesting things was how to read an S-1. An S-1 is the main document that private companies file with the SEC as a precursor to going public. The S-1 is supposed to list every detail about the company that a potential investor would consider relevent when evaluating whether to buy stock in the company. So in these documents, you get all the financials going back several years, lists of all the major stockholders and how much they own, any employment agreements with officers/founders, lists of major agreements the company has with other companies, etc. It’s basically everything about the company. Really interesting stuff to me, because it gave me an idea of what other people in my position (founder of a company) had in terms of employment contracts, how much of the company they had sold to private investors, etc. Stuff that generally you’d never want public. Anyways, I hadn’t read an S-1 in several years, but I saw from John Battelle’s Blog today that Lindows had filed an S-1. Lindows is run by Michael Robertson, who probably doesn’t remember me, but many years ago we both worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and we have some friends in common. Anyways, the S-1 can be viewed here, and it’s pretty interesting. From a cursory reading (this could be wrong, best to verify yourself), Lindows was originally funded with a $5M investment, and has a $10M revolving credit line (debt) with Michael. Michael owns 81.3% of the company and the other officers own an additional 6%. That’s not terribly interesting. Michael funded the company, he owns most of it. What is interesting is Lindows’ revenue. For the year ending December 31, 2003, the most recent information published, they had $2M in revenue. For the year before that they had $63K of revenue. They’ve never had a profit. When eGroups was looking to go public, if I remember correctly, we were told that we needed something like $15-$20M in revenue for the preceeding year before we could go public. And we needed a clear path to profitability. That was during the bubble. When going public, there isn’t necessarily a fixed right or wrong answer to these things. You’re right if you can convince people to buy the stock you’re selling. I am surprised, however, given the financial climate of the last few years, that they would try to go public with that kind of revenue. Of course, just because they filed an S-1 doesn’t mean they will go public, or that they even want to go public. Some companies file an S-1 to make it look like they’re about to go public, when in reality they’re looking to make themselves more attractive as an acquisition. Again, the caveat is that this is based on a quick perusal of the S-1. Read it yourself. It’s not difficult to get past the legalese.