Just wanted to quickly pop in here and say thanks for the spat of recent Bloglines mentions. Scoble mentioned us a few times when he was talking about aggregator adoption rates. Steve Gillmor also mentioned us in his response to Scoble. I could probably write all day about my thoughts about RSS and Aggregation adoption rates, but I’m really busy doing what I can to increase those rates. Things have been quiet on the Bloglines new features front.

During the recent move of Bloglines from Equinex in San Jose to AT&T, we retired a couple of machines and added several new machines. Yesterday, we were reconfiguring what used to be one of the primary database machines at the old co-lo. While swapping out drives, I noticed that the wire for the speaker was completely melted. Looking more closely, the speaker had shorted against the metal chassis. That couldn’t have been good for things.

My first job out of college was working for a defense contractor, splitting time between programming and system administration. It was a small company with a network of SGI machines. I had being working as an intern at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, working on a distributed volume visualization system. I knew that SGI machines were fun to work on and I liked graphics. I’d be able to do both at this new job, and I’d get some sysadmin experience.

This afternoon we released an upgrade to the Bloglines email subscription feature. You can now reply to emails received with your email subscriptions. From the announcement: Email subscriptions make it easy to receive your mailing list messages and other email within your Bloglines account. You can create an unlimited number of special @bloglines.com email addresses. Email sent to those addresses show up in your Bloglines account, as if they were blog entries.

This evening I attended the SDForum Web Services SIG down at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View. I normally don’t go to these things, because I’m really busy and I’m not a very good networker. But tonight’s meeting was on RSS and Tom Gieselmann from Bertelsmann Ventures was one of the speakers. I met Tom back when they first invested in ONElist back in 1998. They’re now looking at the RSS space.

It’s been over a week since I’ve been able to go flying. Work and weather have conspired against me. As a poor substitute, I went through some pictures taken with my Treo 600. The first two were taken by my instructor, Rich Acuff in 374DM, the plane I eventually did my private pilot checkride in. I don’t remember exactly, but my guess is that we were flying out to the coast by Half Moon Bay when these were taken: This last one is of a Pitts Special S-2B.

Sigh. Looks like the main Bloglines user database corrupted itself around 2:30am this morning. It did so in such a way so that the database still ‘ran’, for some definition of that. Which means that none of our automated monitoring picked up on this fact. We will change that. We take snapshots hourly, and we’re recovering to the most recent good snapshot. Unforuntately, that means that if you registered with Bloglines after around 2am Pacific time or so (and that’s a lot of people), you will need to register again.

I apologize to anyone that has sent me email to my bloglines.com email address in the past week and a half. I just realized this evening that I hadn’t been receiving anything at that email address. It was a configuration issue with the new Bloglines machines, and has been in effect since we moved the service. All the email is stored up, so I have everything, I just need to go through it all.

We have rolled out two new Bloglines features, send subscriptions and a user directory. Send subscriptions makes it easy to transfer your Bloglines subscriptions to others. Simply enter the email address of the person, select which of your subscriptions you’d like to send, and add a short message. An email will be sent to the person which contains a link back to Bloglines. If the user is not already a Bloglines user, clicking the link will automatically create a new Bloglines account and pre-populate it with the subscriptions you’ve sent.

Warning, this is a nerdy post. Moreso than normal even. As I was visiting a site this morning that was having problems and spitting out random PHP error messages, I was reminded that I wanted to write up something about web programming. No I’m not going to name the site, but they should know better. And this is not a post bashing PHP, because like many things PHP can be used for good as well as evil.