Dear Citizens of Blogsterville,
We've had a very exciting past few days here on the Blogster Team. We're in the process of bringing several new programmers into the team and they're already hard at work making Blogster a better place.
Nick (the lead programmer), is in the process of an intense upgrade to Blogster's structure which will be bringing about a visible speed increase. For those interested, the new update will be dropping an average of 7 database queries per page which will bring about a noticeable speed increase.
We're working very hard on the foundation of Blogster right now. Though it was functional on launch, it wasn't built in a way to handle growth and over the past few months, though it's been useable, it hasn't been stable or fast.
We're going through and, piece by piece, replacing the foundation that Blogster has been built on and, in it's place, setting a foundation that will last and allow Blogster to grow without unnecesssary growing pains.
Our first priority was to just get Blogster up and running. Now, we're working hard to get it up and running well. Not a lot has happened on the surface lately, but all the hard work we've been putting into the foundation is going to allow updates to what you see and use on a daily basis to proceed much more quickly.
Here's a sense of what you can expect over the next few weeks:
- Privacy Improvements - The foundation we've been working on over the past few weeks has helped us to really streamline the way privacy works. In addition to fixing a few bugs that still exist, Blogster citizens will have the option of blocking and unblocking fellow citizens.
- Notification Bugs Resolved - There are still some inconsistencies with the way email notices work and, with the new foundation, this will soon be resolved
- Additional Updates & Bug Fixes - We'll be making some updates to the "Friends" list to sort it by "last active" site wide as well as a few other smaller fixes.
- New Spam Fighting System - The quality of your blogging experience is of great importance to us here on the Blogster Team. We've commited ourselves to providing an atmosphere where participants will be bothered by as little spam as possible during their time on Blogster. Look forward to a major update on this in the near future.
While those updates are great, we've got even better news. You're not going to be waiting for months for major updates anymore :). Over the past few weeks and months we've been working very hard on efficiency and the new foundation that we're slowly but surely putting into place is going to make progress much faster. You can expect the bulk of these updates before the month is over and steady progress thereafter.
On behalf of the owner and the entire Blogster team, I thank you all for your patience and your faith in us. We look forward to working and sharing with you in building an excellent blogging experience.
Jonathan Wold
Blogster Development Team
21 comments on Update From Behind The Scenes
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I'm really looking forward to these updates.
Me, too!
I am having trouble with the page to write a blog on ,its all messed up. Can you fix it please. Bluegrasslady.
We were doing quite an update this evening, so you might of had issues during this process. Should be fixed now. Let us know if you have any further problems.
Nick
Blogster Support
Yes my pages are blank, why? Bluegrasslady
My post titles are there but there is no post. When you go to the blog post you just get a blank white page. What is going on?
Jenn
come on ,where did my posts go?, please bring them back. my post titles are there but thats all. Please fix.Bluegrasslady
1
We just became aware of the problem, and our programmer is on it.
We will let you know as soon as it is taken care of!
Gunnar
Blogster Development Team
Nick and I are looking into the issue now. First, your posts are completely safe. We did some optimizing of the post pages to increase load time and it looks like there was a bit of a hiccup in actually getting the posts to display.
We'll have it fixed shortly :)!
Jonathan Wold
Blogster Development Team
It has now been taken care of, everything is back where it belongs.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Gunnar
Blogster Development Team
It'll all come together soon!! Thanks for the time you take to get back to our issues..Keep up the good work..
I've asked before but if I got an answer I missed it. Is the "blog traffic" button going to be restored? I hate not knowing who stopped by even if they didn't leave a comment. Please let me know. The site IS getting better. Overall, good job ya'll.
We are planning to release a "recent visitors" feature here in the near future (the next several weeks) and plan to provide more detailed stats as time goes on.
Jonathan Wold
Blogster Development Team
Hey, guys, what's been going on? This is the first I've been able to find Blogster for a day. The connection was often timing out, it was taking so long, or nothing but a blank screen was coming up. Was Blogster off-line or something?
Dear Martne,
Our datacenter had a power surge which took things offline for a number of hours. Once we finally got it back up, the site was still experiencing some unaccounted for slow-downs which has made things unstable. We're working hard on it this morning and will have the site back up to full functionality and increased speed here shortly.
Jonathan Wold
Blogster Development Team
Thanks for filling me in! I'm sure you are working hard to fix it.
Oh, one more thing comes to mind. I'm not getting notices of replies to my comments. Aren't you sending those out anymore?
Dear Martne,
The notices should be working fine now. We had them disabled to do some testing but re-enabled shortly thereafter. Let us know if you're having any further problems with them.
Jonathan Wold
Blogster Development Team
1. I have renamed my last post, but now as one clicks for it it leads you to my profile. Could you please fix that?
2. I do not find my way to upload pictures: they just don't appear on the screen, what can I do?
Whoops! You made that change during a quick test of ours and it wound up breaking the link to your post. It's fixed now.
Regarding photo uploading, when you go to write a new post, there should be a button on the right that says, "Click Here to Upload a Photo".. Do you see that? If so, you should be able to upload photos without a problem. If not, please let me know.
Jonathan Wold
Blogster Development Team
Jessfreethinkin!!
Yes we have that as one of our top request to work on. We hope to have it up and running soon. Sorry for the wait. Have a great day.