Tonight we rolled out a new Bloglines feature called email subscriptions. Basically, an email subscription is like a normal subscription, except that each one comes with a unique Bloglines email address associated with it. The email address is not easily guessable (hard to spam). Whenever an email is received for one of these email addresses, it appears just like a normal blog entry. We support HTML email and even embedded images. When an email subscription is deleted (ie. the user unsubscribes), the associated email address disappears. Email subscriptions are great for announce-only or broadcast mailing lists that don’t provide RSS feeds. They are also useful as temporary email addresses.

Or 12 new warm servers, to be exact. The hungry beast that is Bloglines continues to grow and is demanding more horsepower. When I first started ONElist, there was a period where we had to stop allowing new user registration because the system was so overloaded. That was a very painful lesson that we were luckily able to fully recover and learn from. I vowed then to never get back into a situation like that. A big part of avoiding that problem is architecting the system correctly in the first place. Back then, the database we were using was a simple GDBM thing that I had created. It couldn’t handle the load and wasn’t scalable in any way. I didn’t know any better; ONElist was the first Internet service that I had architected. Until we re-wrote the backend to use Oracle, we were dead in the water. Bloglines doesn’t use Oracle (there’s no need these days; sorry Larry), but I did pay special attention to the database architecture when I first designed Bloglines. It meant a longer development time in the beginning, but now, we can just add more machines when things get overloaded. This does not mean that Bloglines is overloaded right now. Based on our metrics, it’s still very responsive. But we can see the trend. Hence the 12 new servers to ensure that Bloglines is always responsive.

I’m getting ready for my private pilot checkride. Today my instructor and I flew from Palo Alto over to Hayward to practice short-field landings. I don’t quite have the hang of those yet, and it was good practice. On the way back to Palo Alto, the Hayward tower announced that a plane had gone down with an emergency. It was last on the radar near Coyote Hills, which was directly in front of us. After looking around a bit, we saw the Cessna sitting in a field. We called the tower and circled until a helicopter came and landed. People were walking around the plane, and it looked intact, so hopefully nobody was hurt.

I’ve been extra busy over the past couple of weeks. Bloglines continues to grow and add features. We will be moving the servers to a new colocation facility in the next few weeks, and at the same time we will be adding several new machines (and replacing some old ones). All of that takes a lot of time. And we continue to add new features based on the great feedback from our users. I’m especially pleased with our announcement tonight of a Mac OS X version of the Bloglines Notifier. The Windows version has been very popular, and I suspect that our OS X users will enjoy the Mac version. The notifier is a tiny program that you install on your machine. It places a little Bloglines icon in your system tray (or dock for Mac OS X), and pings the Bloglines servers every 30 seconds or so for new items in your account. It’s a great way to be notified that you’ve got new items to read. This past Wednesday, we also announced support for the new Atom syndication format. We are commited to providing seamless integration of all popular syndication formats. It’s just something that our users shouldn’t have to worry about. In addition to all of that, we’ve got many other things in development. Stay tuned!

Very good article on Salon yesterday called That 1994 Feeling about RSS and syndication. Syndication and aggregation are unfamiliar concepts to many people; a lot of education still needs to happen. This article is a good step in that direction. And I’m of course grateful that Scott mentions Bloglines. User testimonials are the best kind of advertising.