Thanks to Om Malik, Erick Schonfeld, and everyone else at Business 2.0 for both naming Bloglines one of the Next Net 25 companies, as well as for inviting me up for a roundtable discussion yesterday afternoon: Unfortunately, I could only stay for about half of the discussion, but the part I was there for was interesting. There was much talk about whether we’re in a bubble again, and whether things are different this time or not.

I’ll be making the trek out to New York City tomorrow morning to attend the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference. I’ll be on the Meet The Blog & Feed Search Engines panel on February 28th, along with Adam Hertz (Technorati), Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo), Chris Redlitz (Feedster), and Chris Tolles (Topix.net): A chance to hear directly from representatives who operate major blog and feed (RSS/Atom) search engines about how they operate. Plenty of time to ask questions after a short presentation.

Also See Parts One, Two, Three, Four. The move itself went almost perfectly. At 2pm, we took the crawlers off-line and started copying many of the databases. At 4pm, we took the entire site down and started copying the remaining databases. Around 5pm, wandering around barefoot, I broke my toe, but that didn’t affect things (other than my toe). Around 7:30pm, it became clear that we would require an extra half an hour to complete things, so we updated the plumber page with the new estimate.

With two weeks to go before the move, we started having daily status meetings with all the people involved with the move: people from site ops, net ops and the entire Bloglines team. These only ran about 10-15 minutes each, but were invaluable in getting issues taken care of quickly. We were still working through issues with blog article migration, but we thought we could still make the December 16th date.

As it happened, the new datacenter was built out before the custom blog article replication code was completed and tested. This was ok, because we wanted to stress test the new datacenter machines. After configuring the new machines, we started running some test crawls against an older version of our feed database. To differentiate this test crawler from the Redwood City production crawlers, we changed the User Agent. Many people noticed a crawler with the User Agent “Bloglines/3.

I received an email about my datacenter move posts. Jeremy Kraybill asked: I’m curious if you considered a zero-downtime move at all, where you would keep the “old bloglines” still running while data was transferred to the new bloglines datacenter, and then switch over to the “new bloglines” via DNS after the new site was up? And either users have data loss of several hours (arguably better than downtime of the same amount), or you replicate transaction logs for user-critical data.

The simplest (and safest) way to move a site is to take it completely down, copy all the data to the new machines, and then bring the site back up at the new datacenter. We could have done that, but the length of downtime required would have numbered in the days, and we didn’t want to do that. Actually, an even simpler way to move a site is to physically take the machines and move them to the new datacenter.

One week ago, we moved the Bloglines service from the AT&T datacenter in Redwood City, CA to MCI in Bedford, Massachusetts. This was a challenging and complex undertaking that required months of preparation by many groups. Now that the dust has settled, over the next couple of days I’ll explain some of the process involved. We had been at AT&T since Bloglines first went on-line in June, 2003, and had been very happy with them.

I’m a bit late with this post, but I wanted to thank the organizers of Eday for the opportunity to speak in Amsterdam a few weeks back. I had a great time and even managed to squeeze in a few days of vacation in Tuscany afterwards (my first vacation in a few years). Also, this is a reminder that I’m speaking tonight at the Building and Launching a Consumer Company session of the IBD Network.

The rest of the year is shaping up to be busy, conference wise. Here is a somewhat complete listing of where I’ll be over the next couple of months: I’ll be at Web 2.0 this Friday, on the Prosumer Media panel. On October 12th, I’ll be giving the keynote at the Emerce Eday conference in Amsterdam. On November 1st, I’ll be on a panel titled Building and Launching a Consumer Company talking about one of my favorite subjects: how it’s gotten very cheap to start and launch Internet companies.