It’s not a very good Monday (morning): After all the work this weekend, it turns out there is a performance glitch somewhere in the new enhancements that is causing bottlenecks to occur under load. This is rather depressing. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to fix it until at least tonight. So I’m afraid all I can offer is the description of the wonderful changes below… stay tuned to actually be able to, you know, use them. At this moment, it looks like, if you are patient, calls to the Details pages do return properly, so feel free to give it a try — just call the page once and wait, please, don’t keep refreshing!
It’s a slightly better Monday evening:: OK, as of now (6pm PDT) I think I have stabilized matters. I’m fairly sure the performance bottleneck is around the ‘top ten posts’ feature, and so I’ve disabled that. The other two new items — history graphs and posts-by-source — seem to be working fine. I’ll be working on the top-ten this evening to see if I can develop a fix; stay tuned…
…and maybe even a little bit better: I’ve implemented Yet Another Fix, this time to the top-ten feature, which I think should improve performance considerably. I’ll be watching closely to see if smoke starts coming out of the server tonight, and more importantly, tomorrow morning. Please report any oddities! Thanks…
——————–
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing quite a bit of work behind the scenes to improve the and add new functionality. There’s still more to be done, but today I’m unveiling some of the new features.
First, thanks to the crew at Hosting Matters, who have upgraded me to a more powerful server, which has improved both performance and stability of the overall site.
Second, the new enhancements. On each weblog’s details page, you’ll now find the following:
– History statistics for the blog’s rank and total unique inbound links presented in a line graph. Check out Power Line, Captain’s Quarters, INDC Journal, Hugh Hewitt or Allah‘s detail pages for good examples.
– An expandable tree menu showing the blog’s ten most-linked-to posts and who linked to them
– An expandable tree menu showing the links which the blog has received from other blogs, sorted in descending order of the source-blog’s Ecosystem rank (for easy identification of ‘big links’ from top bloggers).
My goal with the details page is to create a page with compelling information that every blogger wants to know about how their blog is doing. My hope is that bloggers find this information useful enough to check regularly, and perhaps even set as their home page. So: suggestions on what you’d like to see are most welcome.
There is one caveat: for the moment, all of these new features are available to everyone. Starting sometime in the near future, however, I will be restricting some of them to only be displayed for weblogs that display a link back to their Ecosystem status. You can find instructions on how to do this on your blog’s details page: it’s simple, painless, and automatically shows your ‘status’ for your readers to see . I think this is a fair trade; I receive a little more visibility for my efforts around here, and you get the cool toys to play with showing your blog details.
In summary: I hope you find the new goodies worthwhile, and I’d appreciate your comments, feedback, and yes, complaints. There is still much work to be done, but I hope you’ll enjoy these latest steps forward…
Update: Today is a bit of a trial-by-fire for the new code. I’ve tried to write everything to work efficiently and minimize system load, but I expect (and hope!) the site will get some heavy linkage and traffic today. So we’ll see if the code holds up! ( John Kerry Voice: BRING…… IT….. ON!). We’ve already had one crisis which forced me to a) learn how to use MySQL JOIN’s properly and implement a fast code fix, and b) abort last night’s scans somewhat prematurely. So this morning’s detailed data may be a little bit off, but the good news is I think the fix worked, and so tomorrow the scans should be able to complete with no problem.
As always, please let me know if you see other issues, and thanks for your patience…
Skip to content
technology meets creativity in a disaster-prone world. confident enough to try; humble enough to learn.