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April 01, 2008
weblogs.macromedia.com status
weblogs.macromedia.com status: A single rickety, old server. That's what runs all weblogs and the aggregator hosted on weblogs.macromedia.com. It was architected for a single machine back in the old days, and the people who created it have moved onto other projects. It went out completely last weekend, and the weekend before that -- clearly unacceptable. But Jason Delmore of the ColdFusion team has good news here... the server system is being upgraded to 64-bit ColdFusion 8 as we speak. There will probably be more bad days before it goes over, but the situation is indeed being addressed. A few more thoughts in the extended entry here.
Update: Ryan Stewart has a joke entry, which I first took at face value. Worth a look, but a different subject. [I've changed the text here in this update, after getting tipped by Pat. ;-) ]
One problem facing MXNA has been the massive amount of spam directed at it. From what I've heard, at some times it is almost completely inundated by attack attempts.
Over the past two weeks the server system has been in transit from one group within Adobe to another. This explains the lack of timely feedback when outages did occur.
MXNA needs to change. I'm proud that the Macromedia Aggregator takes from both staffers and customers -- Christian and Mike made a great choice when aggregating the whole ecosystem, not just employee blogs. But that made MXNA an attractive target to shoot for for new blogs. We've had to cut out some blogs that ended up being multi-level marketing or whatever. But even so, 1700 blogs is a large number to scan linearly, or even within little balkanized categories.
Digg and Techmeme have had similar problems, but to greater degree... as a site becomes more popular, the social dynamics necessarily change.
I think there's room for many more visualizations of the news. Megite is one alternative representation of the MXNA news stream. With AIR there's room for lots more.
At some point the weblogs.macromedia.com system will merge into the blogs.adobe.com system, but I haven't heard a date for this yet. Jonathan Wall, one of the principals on the project, is insistent that old addresses should not break, and the whole switch should "just work". More guidance on this schedule as I get it (but I'll be so happy to finally be able to chance some updates to this blog's templating and features....)
I had dropped at least one comment at Steven Sacks' blog already, but it never made it out of the moderation queue. If you've got comment moderation on, I would encourage you to turn it off, and just post-delete any passed spam manually. These "comment prohibitions" are an increasing problem in weblogs today.
Posted by JohnDowdell at April 1, 2008 01:40 PM
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Comments
I think Ryan Stewart's message was an April Fools joke, based on the comments below. :)
[jd sez: Thanks Pat... I had scanned the comments, but didn't see Ryan's post that explicitly stated it was false. He's probably got jet lag, so that's what I'll blame. ;-) But I had heard people internally asking "Should we take down the aggregator to lessen the load on the publishing system?", and so it read plausibly, while I was on the run to make a meeting.]
Posted by: Pat at April 1, 2008 02:57 PM
John, thanks for the update. It's good to know that Adobe cares, but it's also very telling of the future of aggregated content.
As pretty much everyone is syndicating their blogs and websites it becomes an issue of how best to handle the syndication in a timely and reliable manner. Aggregators have certainly been a great resource, but overall the methodology for aggregating and syndicating the content is sloppy and unreliable and does not scale well.
In my opinion, a new methodology needs to be developed that can provide the aggregation of syndicated content quickly, easily, reliably and put some sort of responsibility on the publisher to ensure their syndicated feeds are categorized properly.
Posted by: TJ Downes at April 1, 2008 04:05 PM