Wednesday, March 17, 2004
The payment processing upgrades are complete and fully functional. Instead of only being allowed to purchase Blogrolling Gold subscriptions using Paypal, you can choose from Visa, Mastercard or American Express (translation: you can get Air Miles for upgrading! ;)
On a related note, we are in the process of migrating email and DNS. We don't expect any downtime, but if you notice any flakiness, drop us a note.
Posted on 11:36 AM by Ross Rader
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Neato - Blogrolling.com won a Bloggie! I can't say that the new management deserves any credit for this whatsoever, but if no one minds, I might just stick a vague reference to it on my resume.
Great work Jason - you've definitely shown the folks over at Technorati, Blogdex, Blo.gs and Photoblogs.org who the real king of the castle is ;)
Thanks to everyone who voted for Blogrolling.com - I'm really looking forward to earning your votes again next year. Let the games begin!
Posted on 4:20 PM by Ross Rader
We've made a few improvements to the payment processing system that we will be implementing over the next day or so. Paypal will no longer be available, but payments can be made using any major credit card. If you notice any problems, please let us know. As the new hands on deck, we're still feeling our way around the system and can use all the feedback we can get!
Posted on 3:47 PM by Ross Rader
Friday, February 27, 2004
If you're so inclined you can read the press release here.
Posted on 11:26 AM by Jason DeFillippo
Hi, all!
I'm writing this today to let you all know that Blogrolling has been acquired by the great folks at Tucows and this will be my last news posting. I will be sticking around behind the scenes for a few months helping the new team get their bearings and finishing up some fixes that I've been promising for the past few weeks. But after today I will no longer be the owner of Blogrolling.com.
The decision to sell the company was a very difficult one for me and after talking to several companies who were interested, I decided on Tucows because they are an extremely upstanding group of guys (they're Canadian, after all!) who will treat all of you with care and respect. They are going to continue running Blogrolling as is, which was one of my reasons to go with them. I trust them wholeheartedly and am happy it's going to be taken care of by these fine folks.
I've spent the better half of two years building Blogrolling from the ground up and it wouldn't have been such a stellar success if it wasn't for you all and all the friends I've made along the way. It's been a blast! You can still find me at Lockergnome.com behind the scenes and as author of the weekly Web Developers newsletter and blogging at Blogging.LA.
As I bow out, I'd like to take a second to thank a few people for all their help and guidance along the way. Chris Pirillo -- because without him the site would have never gotten off the ground -- and Joi Ito for so much that it would take a novel to fill. Ross Wm. Rader, The Tucows and Blogware crews, The Blogger Crew, The Movable Type crew, Dave Winer, Shaye!, Reid Hoffman, Dave Sifrey, Barak Berkowitz, Ross Mayfield, Robert Fogarty, Dave Riegler, Scott Zimbler, and everyone else who ever used and still uses Blogrolling. I'm sure I missed about a thousand people but you get the idea. Thanks everyone!
Like I said, I'll still be working behind the scenes for a while so you can still get a hold of me and I'll be getting all outstanding support requests replied to this weekend at some point.
Cheers!
Jason DeFillippo
Posted on 11:05 AM by Jason DeFillippo
Thursday, February 05, 2004
In the fixes yesterday a few key features were disabled for a short period of time. This has affected the top 100, search and reciprolling. These features will all be restored today but may take 24 hours to re-populate.
Posted on 11:03 AM by Jason DeFillippo
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
The load on the servers has basically doubled in the past few weeks and has resulted in some random outages. I'm going to be tweaking the MySQL server some today so there may be a few system wide outages. Please bear with me while I get this sorted.
Posted on 8:27 AM by Jason DeFillippo
Sunday, February 01, 2004
Still working on getting the search refined more. I'll have a patch posted by this evening. I'm also going to be posting a banlist for the pinger. Some sites have been abusing the service. This morning I opened my inbox to 8500 bad ping notifications. Not cool. If you run a blog service set your pinger to know that there is a 5 minute interval between valid pings and if you have sent one already to not send it until the blackout period is up. I believe Weblogs.com has the same timeout period. I keep forgetting to link to this but if you want to add Blogrolling News to your RSS reader here's the URL:
http://www.blogrolling.com/news/index.xml
I'll post it in the sidebar when I get a second.
Posted on 9:39 AM by Jason DeFillippo
Thursday, January 29, 2004
Still making updates as fast as I can. We're up to 1.5 million blogrolls a day. Something's gonna melt soon ;-)
Posted on 12:22 AM by Jason DeFillippo
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
A decent chunk of my support replies are being bounced back because of the SPEWS issue I talked about in a previous post. So if you don't hear back from me that's the main reason. I'm almost caught up on the issues that people have written me about. The main outstanding issue is a double encoding of html entities in the preferences which will be fixed shortly.
Posted on 2:57 PM by Jason DeFillippo
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Hey all, I owe a bunch of people support emails back but my mail has been hosed for the past few days and I'm just getting caught up. I hope to get back to everyone in the next couple of days. Thanks for bearing with me and when are we going to have "kill your local spammer" day?
Posted on 7:08 PM by Jason DeFillippo
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
There are some bugs in the search still. Going to get those sorted out in a bit.
Posted on 11:40 AM by Jason DeFillippo
Monday, January 19, 2004
Ok, preferences ar back with URL editing. Please make sure your URL is up to date. There were about 6,000 invalid URL's that had to be dumped today because of poor filtering on my part and poor input on the users part. Best way to enter your URL for newbs is to go to your blog and copy the URL from your browser's address bar. Should read something along the lines of http://yoursite.com/ kinda thing. Pardon me for the poor docs but I'm exhausted. I'm going to try and get all the duplicates removed from the Fresh.Blogrolling.com site next but it might not happen tonight. Thanks for your patience.
As always if you encounter a bug let me know IMMEDIATELY! Just click on the contact link in the lefthand navbar. Cheers!
Posted on 10:10 PM by Jason DeFillippo
Search, Top 100 and Reciprolls are back online. I have removed the 'Add to Radio' option due to lack of interest and replaced it with an Empty Blogroll tool for clearing a Blogroll of all links. This is handy if you have an existing blogroll on your site and want to import a backup or just clean house. I'm still working on a few more things tonight. The Blogroll Preferences is still missing the Blog URL editing feature. This will be back shortly.
Please remember to keep the URL of your blog fresh! You're missing out on traffic if you don't keep it fresh! The Search, Top 100 and Reciprolls all rely on this easy to use tool. Oh, guess I should get it back online and stop jabbering eh...
Posted on 9:45 PM by Jason DeFillippo
Two pieces of info:
1. The entire site will be back up and running like before sometime this evening so you can stop nagging me about the search and reciprolls ;-)
2. And in other good news I'd like to welcome our 30,000th user!
Posted on 2:42 PM by Jason DeFillippo
Time for the Bloggies again! Last year Blogrolling took home the award for "best weblog directory or update monitor" and we're up for it again this year along with a nomination for "best web application for weblogs" which we lost last year. So if you're feeling inclined please pop on over and give Blogrolling your vote :-)
Posted on 2:29 PM by Jason DeFillippo
Sunday, January 18, 2004
There was a problem at Blogrolling's ISP ServerBeach tonight. Still researching what the issue was but most of the 2 facilities were down. This was not related to the site updates and was unexpected.
Posted on 11:46 PM by Jason DeFillippo
If your email system uses the SPEWS blacklisting list I urge you to change to a more reliable provider as soon as possible. They have blacklisted all of my servers and the servers of many others on ServerBeach without a justifiable cause. Niether Blogrolling or any of my other sites or webservers have ever been a site for spamming and to be blacklisted is an outrage. After reading their F.A.Q. it's even more outrageous. I run all my servers from dedicated IP's and know every bit of traffic flowing through my NIC and not one ounce has ever been spem so I urge you once more to change your filtering to a more reliable system.
Posted on 4:08 PM by Jason DeFillippo
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Working on the system all weekend to get everythign back online and up to snuff. There may be some intermittent outages but I'll post here before hand and will try to keep them to a minimum.
Posted on 11:36 AM by Jason DeFillippo
Saturday, January 03, 2004
Preferences issues should be taken care of now. I have removed the Blog URL fields in anticipation for the new system coming online shortly. I'm getting the new server prepped now and it will hopefully be coming online very shortly. Back to it.
Posted on 10:40 PM by Jason DeFillippo