Just wanted to quickly pop in here and say thanks for the spat of recent Bloglines mentions. Scoble mentioned us a few times when he was talking about aggregator adoption rates. Steve Gillmor also mentioned us in his response to Scoble. I could probably write all day about my thoughts about RSS and Aggregation adoption rates, but I’m really busy doing what I can to increase those rates. Things have been quiet on the Bloglines new features front. That doesn’t mean we’re not working hard on new features. We generally try to release something new every week, but with some of the bigger projects we’re working on, we sometimes can’t make that schedule. And I don’t like talking about features haven’t been released yet. I can tell you that a new version of the Bloglines Windows notifier will be released this week, provided testing goes well. This is mainly a bug-fix release, for people with proxies that require authentication. But it will also have the ability to specify longer intervals between pings, and the oft-requested feature that clicking on the system tray icon always brings up your Bloglines account in your browser. In the current version, that only happens when you have new items to read. Oh, and speaking of notifiers, one of our users has written a Unix/KDE version of the Bloglines notifier. It just hit Sourceforge, and you can download the code here. We’ll be posting a note on the Bloglines site about it soon. Ok, guess this wasn’t such a quick note.

During the recent move of Bloglines from Equinex in San Jose to AT&T, we retired a couple of machines and added several new machines. Yesterday, we were reconfiguring what used to be one of the primary database machines at the old co-lo. While swapping out drives, I noticed that the wire for the speaker was completely melted. Looking more closely, the speaker had shorted against the metal chassis. That couldn’t have been good for things. And now, for whatever reason, that machine is completely flakey and crashes every hour or so. While it was functioning as one of the database machines at the old co-lo, it crashed a grand total of once in about 1 year of heavy operation. This was one of the machines I originally bought used off eBay. I got it cheap and it worked really well for a year, so no complaints. Ebay is still a good source for cheap gear, although it seems like there’s less good stuff (computer wise) these days than say a year ago.

My first job out of college was working for a defense contractor, splitting time between programming and system administration. It was a small company with a network of SGI machines. I had being working as an intern at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, working on a distributed volume visualization system. I knew that SGI machines were fun to work on and I liked graphics. I’d be able to do both at this new job, and I’d get some sysadmin experience. It sounded great. Jim Patterson was the main system administrator and one of my bosses. Unfortunately, it didn’t take me long to realize that the job wasn’t for me. Specificially, the world of defense wasn’t for me; I just wasn’t interested in what everybody was working on. But even though I wasn’t terribly happy with the work, I’m very glad I took the job. Jim was a great mentor, and I learned a lot about system administration from him. I think every programmer should have some sysadmin experience; I’m convinced it makes you a better programmer. The IRIX version of Unix that SGI shipped with their boxes was considered state of the art for its time. Very stable (at least the 4.0 version that I initially used), and easy to program to. Even so, it taught me to avoid some things. Specifically, NFS and NIS never seemed to work correctly. NFS, in particular, would cause machines to freeze up randomly. It was such a pain that I vowed to never use NFS voluntarily again. And I haven’t used it since. How did this experience effect the architecture of ONElist and, now, Bloglines? NFS is used to distribute access to a partition (ie. data) to multiple machines. Instead of using NFS, I take two approaches. For read-only information, I copy files between machines and have the programs just read them off the local disk. It’s simple and scales very well, as long as you’re not copying huge amounts of data every 10 seconds or so. In the other case, where I’m dealing with either large quantities of information, or re-writable data, I create simple client/server applications. Yes, this can be a bit of work the first time you do it, but it’s easy enough to create a library that makes creating these client/server pairs really easy. By doing this, you can also instrument them so that you can get all sorts of statistics that you’d be hard pressed to get using NFS. For each server, I also have a ‘ping’ application that queries the server for various statistics. The servers get pinged once a minute, and are hooked up to a monitoring/paging system, so we know quickly if there’s a problem. There are many other design decisions that must be made when building a scalable on-line service, like how you will partition and distribute the various data, but I’ve procrastinated enough for today. Time to get back to work.

This afternoon we released an upgrade to the Bloglines email subscription feature. You can now reply to emails received with your email subscriptions. From the announcement: Email subscriptions make it easy to receive your mailing list messages and other email within your Bloglines account. You can create an unlimited number of special @bloglines.com email addresses. Email sent to those addresses show up in your Bloglines account, as if they were blog entries.

This evening I attended the SDForum Web Services SIG down at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View. I normally don’t go to these things, because I’m really busy and I’m not a very good networker. But tonight’s meeting was on RSS and Tom Gieselmann from Bertelsmann Ventures was one of the speakers. I met Tom back when they first invested in ONElist back in 1998. They’re now looking at the RSS space. Anyways, both Tom and Chris Pirillo, who was presenting via webcast from LA, said some very nice things about Bloglines during their respective presentations. Thanks guys! I really appreciate it.