Facebook Integration Update & More

We’ve updated our Facebook integration to the new open graph api and OAuth 2.0 authentication method. What does this mean to you?

• No more expiring sessions, i.e. blips not posting to Facebook
  The old authentication was session based and the sessions would expire after a certain amount of time.
• Post to pages other than your profile
  If you manage multiple Facebook pages, you’ll now be able to choose which pages your blips get sent to.



• Find out which of your Facebook friends are on Blip.fm
  When viewing your account details we’ll show a list of all your Facebook friends who are also Blip.fm DJs.

If you’ve already integrated you’re Facebook account, you’ll need to update your Facebook authentication to see these updated options by visiting:

http://blip.fm/settings/integration

Click the “update authentication” link.

Also In This Update

Also included with this update were a number of performance improvements and bug fixes. If you’re interested in this geeky stuff like us, let us know and we’ll shed more light on some of the steps we’ve taken and what else we’ve got planned to make the site even more snappy!

Performance Maintenance

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

Twitter Updates And Other Goodies

Twitter Integration Updates

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.

Other Stuff

• Bad YouTube links should be removed from search results more quickly
• Query tweaks to improve performance

Tonight’s Maintenance

UPDATE 5:53 am PST - We’re having issues with one of our database tables. We’re in process of repairing this table, but this will likely take another hour or two.

Tonight’s maintenance will add one major new feature: the ability to follow your blip friends on twitter (if they’ve integrated their twitter account) right from within the Blip.fm website. There are also a number of bug fixes and performance improvements. Most notable of those is the quicker removal of YouTube links that have become unavailable. We’re also continuing to diagnose and fix the slowdown issues that have been affecting the site as of late. The blog will be updated with more details once the maintenance is over

–Yan

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!