On Saturday, my other site, Trustic, was Slashdotted. It was the top story for 3 hours or so, I’m told. Fantastic. You always hear about the ‘Slashdot effect’, of how it funnels so much traffic to linked sites, that they go down in a steaming pile of dead server hardware. Well, that didn’t happen to Trustic. Between Saturday evening and 11:59pm Sunday night, Trustic served about 36,000 pages. Not hits, pages. And the vast majority of those were database driven, not static. Served without a hitch. I was even in Santa Cruz, away from the computer, when it happened.
Am I a genius? Some super server architect? I doubt it, although I do have some experience in that area with groups. I get the impression that the majority of sites that Slashdot links to are run off of DSL or modem lines. It does take a certain amount of bandwidth to deal with a slashdotting. But bandwidth is getting very, very cheap these days. I used to say that hardware was free but bandwidth was expensive. That’s no longer the case. There are definite advantages to working in the ‘post-bubble’ world.

Did you know that Scoble has 48 subscribers on Bloglines as of last night? That probably makes him a pretty influential guy. But what I can’t understand is why he hasn’t tried out Bloglines yet. You’d think that a smart guy like him would like to know how 48 of his subscribers are viewing his site.
Of course, Dave has 89 subscribers on Bloglines as of last night. Dave, did you know that Bloglines supports RSS 2.0? We do.

Trustic was mentioned on Slashdot yesterday. Hundreds of people have signed up for the service because of the mention, and we’re grateful. The service handled the load fine, which is good because I was away from a computer almost the entire time.
Please also visit Bloglines, my other service. Bloglines is a web news aggregator. You can stay up to date with Slashdot and thousands of other sites easily with Bloglines. And because Bloglines is a service, you don’t have to download or install any programs.

He claims he only has 18 readers. Well, on Bloglines, he has 19 readers. He’d know this if he looked at his referer logs, where the Bloglines crawler includes the number of subscribers to that feed with the normal User-Agent information.
Yes, this is a blatant attempt at getting him to look at Bloglines. Gotta pimp my service any way I can.
I have no idea what a dunderhead is.

In no particular order:

• Things are progressing well with Bloglines. I fixed up the subscription process today and squashed some more bugs. Next up is fixing the Manage Subscriptions screen, adding search, and adding a way for people to make their subscription list publically viewable.
• Bloglines handles the new AOL Journals feeds fine.
• My Bloglines subscriptions now number about 90.
• I wonder if I should try to pick a fight with one of the “A-list” bloggers in order to get publicity for Bloglines. Maybe add a feature that would display diffs of updated entries.
• I started setting up Moveable Type for this blog, but didn’t feel like mucking with Apache config stuff tonight.
• Apache 2.0 has problems, best I can tell. If your scripts output “too much” to stderr, they freeze. That sucks, and hampers debugging.
• All my production machines run Apache 1.3, and I see no reason to change.
• Feedster is no longer crawling Bloglines every half an hour. I talked with Scott and now they pull the list of new feeds once a night.
• I’m learning to fly in a little Citabria taildragger. Been taking lessons for about a month and a half. I can now take off and land with a little bit of proficiency (enough to live through the experience, but not enough for me to be happy with my skill level). Now that the crushing fear has subsided, flying is getting to be really fun.

Bloglines in DayPop’s Top 40
See here That’s fantastic! So far, the reaction to Bloglines has been uniformly positive. People like having an aggregator that they can access without having to download and install software, and that can be accessed from multiple machines.
I continue to make improvements to the system, based on user suggestions. Expect to this week see search and a few other goodies.

Feedster
Going through the web logs of Bloglines, I noticed that Feedster is selectively crawling the site every half hour or so. Feedster is an RSS search engine. The interesting thing is that Feedster is only fetching one page, the list of new feeds added in the past 24 hours. My guess is that he’s written a parser for the page and is using it to find new feeds to crawl.
Smart move, from a business perspective. But, the page only changes once a day, so he doesn’t need to crawl it every half an hour. And, he could give Bloglines a plug or two. Of course, it’d be pretty easy to add a search function to Bloglines, and I plan on doing so soon. But I don’t think that’d make Bloglines and Feedster competitors.

News Aggregators In Email Clients
Some people are using news aggregators that allow RSS feeds to be inserted/delivered along with their normal email. They say they like this integration, but I don’t get it. My email inbox is so busy as it is, mainly with spam (that I’m trying to stop), that I really don’t want more things to show up there. Just like I don’t read USENET in my inbox, I want to keep news feeds in a seperate application (like Bloglines ).

Don’t Vote For Mark For Governor
I live in California, where there appears to be a good chance that there will be a recall election for Governor. I heard on the news last night that, if this happens, it will be pretty easy to get on the ballot. All you need is 65 signatures and $3000. So, if we do have a recall election, I’m thinking of running for Governor. Not really, but it could be interesting to get my name on the ballot. If I do, it’d be to protest the whole damn thing. Not just the recall, which is being led by the Republicans. But also to protest the Democrats, who were at least partly responsible for getting California into the mess that we’re in now. The whole damn lot of them need to be slapped around like Larry, Curly and Moe.

Hypocrite
As people have pointed out, I am a hypocrite. I have created a news aggregator, a system that depends on RSS/RDF files, and yet my blog has neither of those. I am a hypocrite.
I will fix this. Just give me a little time.