As many of you have realized, our database servers have been overloaded for several hours now. We’ve place the site into emergency maintenance mode in order to get things sorted. We estimate that this window will last around 1 hour. Thanks,
The main focus of tonight’s maintenance is our new embed widget. The appearance of the widget is highly customizable so you can make it look good wherever you want to put it. We made the decision to have blips link back to the site as opposed to play within the widget for three reasons. First, given our limited resources, maintaining the widget is much easier without having to update it as we add / remove content sources. Second, we wanted to ensure a consistent experience for all viewers of the widget and avoid any confusion that might stem from some blips being playable (as dictated by content sources) and others not. Lastly, we wanted the widget to be lightweight in order to load quickly wherever it is placed. We hope you like it!
There are some other odds and ends included as well:
As always, if you have any feedback on the widget or the site in general, be sure to drop us a line at feedback@blip.fm. Thanks for your support!
– Yan
Tonight’s maintenance deals largely with SEO, performance enhancements, and bug fixes. The next release will focus more on user experience and feature updates / additions. Thanks for your patience and support! See you on the other side!
–
Yan
Tonight’s maintenance includes several performance improvements that will help to alleviate load on our database servers. There are no new front-end facing features. Thanks,
– Yan
A while back Twitter announced that it would be terminating support for basic http authentication to its api at the end of June 2010. To this end, we’ve transitioned our Twitter integration to use the OAuth standard. If you’ve already integrated a Twitter account, you will see a message asking you to authorize Blip.fm’s Twitter application to post to your Twitter account. If you don’t wish to do so, you can either disable your Twitter integration or remove it. The transition to OAuth means that we’ll no longer need to store your actual password, making the whole process of having your Twitter account integrated with us more secure.
In addition to the OAuth transition, we’ve also made it easy for you to follow your blip friends’ Twitter accounts via an option on the gear drop down menu on that user’s blips or from the gear drop down menu on their profile. You can prevent this option from showing up in these menus by disabling your twitter account on your integration settings page. Similarly, this option will not function for any user that you’ve blocked.
Since we allow users to integrate multiple Twitter accounts, we’ve chose the first Twitter account you integrated to be your “default account”. This is the account that other users will follow when they choose the “Follow on Twitter” option from the aforementioned menus. You can easily choose which one of your Twitter accounts is your default on your integration settings page.
