No, it does, honest. It really likes what you’ve done with your hair, too. 
Fear not, we’ve been informed of the widget’s issues (broken PostRank graphic, broken links back to our site), and as of a few minutes ago, a fix has been deployed.
That said, if you notice any other weird widget behaviour, do let us know.
Happy Hallowe’en!
If we had fewer users it would be a lot easier to innovate! I mean puleeze - get out of our way already. Can’t you see we’re trying to build something really cool…for our…users. Hmm.
The paradox of product development: balancing the efforts maintaining and incrementally enhancing the released stuff while continuing to evolve and innovate in a dynamic and evolving market. Its no easy task to be sure and takes equal amounts of judgment and science.
Our dev team recently completed a sprint where we knocked off a serious pile of issues for released code. During the same sprint we added significant functionality for our upcoming release. It was a great example of striking this balance - and a display of some serious productivity.
Special thanks to Andrew and Melanie for keeping us on the the line:
I keep a close watch on these bugs of mine
I keep my backlog open all the time
I keep the yellow stickies for the code that grinds
Because you whine, we walk the line
[Note from Melle: The song stylings expressed in the preceding lyrical snippet do not reflect the opinions of AideRSS, Inc. towards its community, and are merely a function of maintaining rhyming pattern. Besides, the devs here whine way more than anybody else.]
Today’s maintenance window was a success; meaning no one died, code was promoted successfully and not a single drop of coffee was lost.
This was largely an infrastructure release (yes that’s some solid innuendo for ‘we have some stuff up our sleeves’) however users should see some noticeable improvements.
First, we made our feed importing far more resilient to the pecularities and foibles of RSS and Atom. In our testing even feeds that couldn’t successfully pass at FeedValidator were being imported. That said it’s software not a magic wand, so we can’t guarantee miracles but trust me, it’s way better.
The next major improvement for our users relates to comments. Believe it or not getting accurate comment counts is no small feat. This release brings a significant improvement in comment accuracy.
Lastly we’ve changed our HTTP server to improve performance and also to handle a pecularity that was preventing certain Yahoo Pipes feeds from processing correctly due their parameters getting munged.
And there’s a good dose of bug fixes in the mix as well.
So there you have it, thanks for your patience and we hope you enjoy the improvements
After tackling the European and Russian encodings in one of our previous updates we’ve been busy working on the Asian character sets! It took us a couple of upgrades, but I’m happy to say that we are finally rolling out full Asian character set support as of earlier today. A big thank you is due to all the bloggers who have have approached us from that part of the world and helped us in testing and integration.
As well, just a few minutes ago we have released an update to fix a delivery bug: some of the filtered RSS feeds were not pushing out new content over the course of past several days even though the data was showing up on our site and in our ‘My Feeds’ section. The problem affected a subset of feeds, and you would have encountered it if you used a 3rd party feed reader application. Our apologies for the inconvenience, and a thank you to Benjamin Newman who gave us the lead on this problem. As of this moment, everything is back to normal and all RSS feeds are being delivered on time!
It took us a little less than a month to index our first 3 million blog posts, and the rate at which we’re adding new posts is still accelerating. In the process, our initial assumptions about the database schemas and performance were stretched to the limit, finally signaling for the need to update and upgrade some of our infrastructure. Hence, over the course of the weekend, we’ve successfully migrated our databases to a new setup.
As part of the upgrade process earlier last night we did have to take our database offline for several hours - our apologies for the inconvenience. Having said that, everything is back online and is now running smoothly! In fact, we’ve added over 200,000 new blogs posts just today. Keep them coming!
