Back when we were going through the ONElist/eGroups merger, we had some fairly significant downtimes, as we first moved the ONElist service to our own servers from Digital Nation, and then as we merged the two services. We needed a down page, something to display on the web site during these down times. I wanted it to be something humorous, and I worked with Jack Wu to create what became the ’eGroups Plumber’.

I’ll always have a soft-spot for the Merc. David Plotnikoff wrote a great article about ONElist back in the day. Mike Langberg writes today in Software keeps track of Weblog, news-site updates that: If you want to stick your toe in the RSS water, I’d recommend starting with Bloglines, because it’s free and there’s no software to install on your computer. User testimonials are always the best PR.

Bloglines has been sluggish at times the past couple of days. Our user numbers and web traffic keep increasing at a good clip, and we reached a point where the existing hardware couldn’t handle it. So we added more hardware yesterday and moved one of the databases around. That helped with the load, but it uncovered another bottleneck, which we were dealing with today. And then this evening, our main web server died.

In today’s Buffalo News. “I like the convenience of Bloglines because you can log on from home, office or anywhere to check the headlines on the free account that you set up online. It takes five minutes or less to register, then you go hunting for all of the RSS feeds you see fit to aggregate.”

A popular request of Bloglines has been for a version for connected PDAs. This evening we rolled out a version of Bloglines specifically tailored to PDAs. The pages are simpler and contain less graphics. Not as pretty or feature rich as the standard Bloglines web site, but functional on small devices. It’s incredibly cool that I can now view my subscriptions on my Treo 600 while I’m away from the computer.