More Props & Performance

A lot of you are wondering what exactly was in last night’s update. 99% of the update was focused on backend / geeky stuff. If you’re interested in the kinds of things of optimization we’ve done / will be doing on the front end, you can check YAHOO’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website.

BUT…. there was also one other important change we made. Based on feedback we’ve received since well… pretty much since props began, we’ve increased the per user / per day limit from 3 to 10. We hope this will help all of you show your appreciation for your favorite blippers more!

Tonight’s Maintenance: Nuts & Bolts

Many of you have noticed that the site has been creaking a little bit lately. Our database servers have been under a bit of stress and that’s caused pages to take a while to load or even timeout. Tonight we’re going to be pushing a number of performance improvements both with regard to database queries as well as the front end. The end goal is to make the site faster, more responsive and reliable.

Please know that this is an ongoing effort and that tonight’s updates are just a first step in many that we have planned to really get everything as optimized as possible on the site. Naturally, there are other things we have to work into our development schedule besides performance, but from here on out, we’ll be trying to sneak some sort of performance improvement in along with whatever else we happen to be working on.

We appreciate your patience and understanding. Know that even if we aren’t always the most responsive, we’re always listening and working to make Blip.fm a great place to enjoy music with friends!

Thanks and happy blipping,

– Yan and the Blip.fm Crew

Major Email Snafu

UPDATE:
Here’s an overview (my words) of what happened from MailChimp:

Due to the large size of our list, the http request to send the email timed out, resulting in no confirmation page being shown despite the fact that the email had been queued for sending. Subsequent attempts to send the mailing then caused the mailing to be queued again and again. MailChimp was able to manually stop the process during the 4th send. Their developers are currently patching their code so this will never happen again and improving the interface so that this is completely transparent to the end user.

ORIGINAL:
Many of you are already aware that we have had a significant problem with our regular weekly user activity updates. These usually go out once a week, but in the last 48 hours the same email update went out to each recipient up to 4 times. Our sincerest apologies for the hassle this has caused many of you. We are working with MailChimp to identify the cause and make sure this does not happen again.

We will provide an update once we have identified the problem and fixed it. Thanks for your understanding and, again, we can’t say enough how sorry we are this happened!

Best,
The Blip.fm Team

Tonight’s Maintenance

Hey Everybody,

We’re upgrading one of our essential servers tonight. We hope to have the site back up in less than one hour. See you soon.

-Yan

Welcome Blip.fm Ambassadors

Blip.fm has grown a lot since we launched in 2008, and one of the challenges of having a small team and many loyal users is how to stay responsive to your questions and support issues. As part of improving our outreach, we are introducing a role called the “Blip.fm Ambassador”. We’ve asked two active early adopters (from among many!) to help us keep the information flowing. We have an idea of what the role will be, but it will certainly evolve over time. Blip.fm Ambassadors are NOT technical support, but they do know how to do pretty much everything on the site. Think of them more as community managers.

So who are the new Blip.fm Ambassadors? We’ve asked @briangreene and @evablue to be our first. They’ve been active users from the beginning and we think they know Blip.fm pretty well to be able to help out. Remember, it’s a voluntary position and they’re not 24/7 support, but we’re confident that we’re covering quite a few time zones for open communications.

@briangreene, joined in August 2008, is a radio g33k from Dublin, Ireland. He loves all things music and social radio. Brian blogs at http://posterous.briangreene.com
[blip.fm / twitter / facebook]

@evablue, joined in September 2008, is a concert photographer, music listening junkie with g33k tendencies based out of Montreal, Canada. Check out her site at http://www.evablue.net
[blip.fm / twitter / facebook / flickr]

Specifically for Blip.fm issues, or if you are interested in participating in the Blip.fm Ambassador program, you should contact @briangreene or @evablue via Blip.fm.

Our thanks to @briangreene or @evablue for their willingness to help the whole Blip.fm community!

@Jeff
Founder and CEO, Blip.fm