The last couple of weeks I’ve been busy with travel and work. And I had the misfortune of coming back from New York with a nasty cold. But that doesn’t mean that things aren’t progressing with Bloglines. We’re in the middle of one of our hardware upgrade cycles - we generally have to add machines to the Bloglines cluster every few months to keep up with growth. This past month, the API announcement and all the press has accelerated the latest upgrade cycle.

I continue to be amazed at the activity surrounding our announcement last week of the Bloglines Web Services. Several libraries have been quickly developed to interface with the BWS, and several aggregators have been working on supporting the services. I think I’ve even seen a Bloglines IM notifier client. We just opened up a set of forums for developers to talk about the BWS. In other Bloglines news, there was a really interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today talking about RSS and Bloglines.

All I can say is “Wow!” We thought people would be interested in the BWS, but the overwhelmingly positive response was beyond our expectations. Thanks! Here are just a few items on the announcement: Eweek : Bloglines Tackles RSS Bandwidth Issue O’Reilly : The New Bloglines Web Services, which was then Slashdotted Someone has already written a BWS Perl Module. This is fantastic! Links to Blogllines, the announcement and the new services section of the web site dominate today’s Top Gaining Links So, to everyone, thanks for the support!

Tomorrow morning around 5am Pacific Time, a press release with the title New Bloglines Web Services Selected by FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Blogbot to Eliminate RSS Bandwidth Bottleneck will go out, but I’m so excited I’m going to blog about it now. So what is this? First, continuing a tradition we started with the notifiers, we’re augmenting the data that you can pull out of Bloglines programmatically. We’re calling the new functions the Bloglines Web Services and we’ve launched a whole new part of the web site to document them.

At Bloglines, we have 3 classes of machines in our cluster. We’ve got web boxes, which are pretty lightweight. We’ve got storage class machines, which as you can guess have big drives and medium speed processors. And we have database class machines, which have fast processors, fast disk, and lots of ECC memory. Fast disk, in general, means some form of SCSI. The database machines use Ultra SCSI drives, specifically Seagate Cheetah Ultra320s in a RAID configuration.