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  The Work Processing Queue

  Ben 9:28 pm on January 18, 2010 | 0 Comments Permalink
  

  You may have noticed in the last few days that there is more time between when you click to share something and when the work is completed.  Maybe you even got a little worried about it.  So I thought I’d provide a little explanation by way of an inside peek at what happens under the hood of the Share button.

  Every time a member clicks to share something, we create a ‘work order’ for that bookmark and put it into a work processing queue, which is basically just a big list of all the bookmarks we have to process.  Every couple minutes we go looking for work to do, and if we find any, we pull the top few out and start kicking them out to the bookmarking sites.

  Depending on how many work orders are in that queue, it could take a while for us to get around to one near the bottom of the list.  But that’s ok – there’s no reason that the bookmarks need to be posted right when the button gets clicked, and it was never intended to do so.  Up until recently, it usually happened pretty quickly anyway, but as the number of users on the system scales up, that near-real-time result is less and less likely to happen.

  Don’t worry though, once a bookmark has gone into the work queue it will be processed, even if it’s not right away.

   

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  Moved to new host

  Ben 6:21 pm on January 16, 2010 | 0 Comments Permalink
  

  As we’ve been growing, you can probably imagine that the load on our server has been increasing.  At the same time, our need for a higher level of support and customer service is also growing.  More users depending on our service means that we need to be confident that we can find help right away if we need it.

  To tackle both of these challenges, we moved SocialAdr to a new web host this past week.  For the most part it was a smooth transition, although we do have just a couple of minor configuration tweaks that we’re getting cleaned up.  The one impact to our customer has been that the speed with which we’re able to process the bookmarks they’ve shared is somewhat decreased.  The work is still recorded and will be completed eventually, but it hasn’t been as timely as we’d like.

  We’re leveraging the enhanced support capabilities of our new host to get it resolved and expect things to return to usual shortly.  For the long run, we’re better positioned at our new home to rapidly scale up as our user base grows.

   

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  Getting the Most from SocialAdr

  Ben 2:48 pm on December 28, 2009 | 0 Comments Permalink
  

  I know we’ve been a little quiet through the holiday season, but even Kane deserves a break once in a while.  We’ve been working on helping all the new members get settled in, as well as a few other changes that have been noted on the blog like the upgrade page, etc.

  Once the new year hits, expect things to pick up again.  But in the meantime, if you haven’t checked out this page on how to get the most out of your SocialAdr account, it’s definitely worth a quick read.  There are a few simple steps you can take to make sure that your getting the most bang for your buck.

   

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  Video Interview with Kane

  Ben 8:40 pm on December 14, 2009 | 0 Comments Permalink
  

  This is from a few weeks ago when I was out in San Diego, and yes I’m just getting around to posting it.  Enjoy!

  I especially like the part where Kane’s neighbor decided it would be a good idea to strike up a conversation with him.

   

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  What’s going on with social bookmarking services?

  Ben 2:02 pm on December 13, 2009 | 0 Comments Permalink
  Tags: backflip (2), searchles (2), simpy (2), social bookmarking services (4), social bookmarking software (1)

  If you use SocialAdr regularly (and why wouldn’t you, it’s the best social bookmarking software out there, right?), you’ve no doubt noticed that there’s been a lot of turnover lately in the social bookmarking services that we support.  I wanted to take a few seconds and explain what’s been happening.

  As you know, nothing on the Internet works perfectly.  We see random errors popping up with every bookmarking service, so we don’t get too panicky when it happens.  Sometimes there are bigger problems though, and those are what have been driving the changes to the services.  The services that we’ve turned off fall into a couple categories:

  1. Services that go down – Some services that were working well for us, like Backflip, just turn off.  In their case, it sounds like there was a problem with their host and they haven’t been able to get a restore.  They went down in October and are still not working, so we had to find someone else to replace them.  We had a similar problem with Searchles – they just randomly stopped working at all.  Luckily they came back, and we do monitor to see when services are working again so that we can add them back into SocialAdr.
  2. Services that are flaky – Some services seemed good when we evaluated them, or we received a recommendation for them, but once we implemented and started using them it turned out they just weren’t reliable.  When we see error rates at a steady 50%, it’s just not worth the hassle for us or for our users.
  3. Services that are aggressively opposed to software – We want to play nicely with social bookmarking services, and feel that because we only place links that our users choose to bookmark, there’s no reason we shouldn’t all get along.  But a couple of services, like Simpy, would definitely prefer that we did not connect to them.  We much prefer to just drop them and replace the service with someone else.

  We think that we’ve got a solid, stable core of 14 services now, plus a couple that are probably on their way out.  We may leave them in for a while as a sort of ‘bonus’, in that we aren’t counting them into our number of links but they do work sometimes.  We’re expecting the churn to drop off drastically from this point forward, and are hoping not to need to replace any more services for a while.

   

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