FeedAgg Blog

There hasn’t been a whole lot of news on the blog lately and that’s because the things i’ve been working on haven’t been very obvious in terms of features.  What I have been doing is working under the hood a lot to improve site performance.  When building a website with very few users it’s easy to do simple joins on items or have your your database in 3nf and follow “the rules.”  However once you start scaling up to 10′s of millions of rows in a database those rules no longer apply.  Long story short and without getting into boring details, i’ve made some large strides in site performance that are noticeable to frequent visitors.  Some areas of the site like new feed listings and tag listings have seen 10 – 20 x performance increases. Other areas like the home page and feed pages have seen noticeable increases as well.

Now that i’ve gotten some of these things out of the way i’ll be getting back to adding more features and tools for our users.  If you’ve been poking around your user account you may have already seen hints.  As always, if you have any features or improvements you would like to see just let me know!

There’s a great article at WebProNews called Content Syndication Is Your Friend that I suggest everyone takes a look at.

It talks about how syndicating your content is a great way to gain exposure and traffic for your content that outweighs the unknown penalty of duplicate content.

I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts below.

Fixed a twitter posting bug that was affecting some users.  You may want to reconfirm your twitter posting time interval under your twitter info as some feeds were changed because of the bug.

I’ve added a couple new features to the user management pages by request.

Feed Name editing – When editing a feed, you can now change the name.

Email Address editing – You can now edit your email address under your info page.

Better Sorting Options – I’ve added some sorting options for feeds under your feed listing page.  I’ll be adding some more in the future.

We’ve addressed downtime that occurred today.  It seems our firewall had a bit of a holiday hangover and forgot it’s settings for a bit.  Things should be better now.

We were alerted to a problem with feeds not posting to Twitter accounts this morning.  We’ve identified the problem and it should be working again.

We discovered a database snafu in our previous restoration this morning so we are finishing another restoration.  The site should be back shortly.

We experienced some down time this morning that resulted in a corrupted database.  We’ve restored the server with a backup from last night and things should be back to normal.  If you’ve submitted a feed or created an account in the last 12 hours you may have been affected.  Contact us if you are experiencing any issues.

I’ve been making a number of changes behind the scenes to help handle the growth we’ve been seeing.  Some areas that have been affected have been stats viewing, tag viewing and feed adding.

You should already be noticing speed improvements when viewing feeds by tags as well as when adding feeds.  Stats are taking a bit longer due to the amount of data but should be back to normal soon.

Let me know if you are seeing problems in the comments section here.

Some small fixes have been released today that solve problems some users where having with logging out as well as some graph display issues users with lots of clicks where having in their feed stats.