WordPress Response

I am not going to move the blog. Great response and in a timely fashion impress me, to the point of me totally deciding to stay with WordPress.

I got a response from a previous email that said that we are working on the problem and that it should be fixed now. Well that was before the problems last night. So I wrote a fairly pointed email back saying that in no way was it fixed. In addition there have been a few mentions in the blogosphere about the issues.

Seems that WordPress has grown at a rate that they were not expecting and that they have had some difficultity keeping up. This has resulted in servers slowing down and being unreliable. I got a response from my email in under an hour, you can not get better than that! The first thing I got was an apology. The second thing was that I was informed that they have purchased more bandwidth which should speed up things around WordPress. I have been informed also that as fast as they install new hardware (by that I presume hard-drives) it fills up. I think this is just a reflection of the growth of the blogosphere, it is growing at a phenomenal rate and doesn’t look like slowing down. However this week it looks like they are having a mass install of new hardware in their data centres and that will make a world of difference, I hope it does.

This is evident in the WordPress Blog so that’s good to hear:

We’re in the very final stages of bringing the new systems online, just waiting the last few bits of configuration to come online. As we’re more than doubling the servers we’re using, it should address all performance issues and help us prevent any for a long time to come.

Finally, I was told that they are working very hard at making WordPress a great domain that just works. The response also said that they have not been achieving that recently and that they have dissapointed their users. But they have the solution and they are working on it. So hang in there bloggers there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Interestingly Sebastian and I mentioned in the podcast last week that the ping times for WordPress to Technorati are terrible and that bloggers need to manually ping Technorati to see some benefits from it. This is a problem with Ping-O-Matic and Technorati recognised by WordPress as Matt has been talking to Technorati about resolving the issue. My advice keep doing it manually as this has not been resolved yet, I will try to keep you posted.

Great response from WordPress and I hope that I can continue to support WordPress as I like their style and they are excellent in the support stakes.

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NewsGator Response

I am compelled to write this post due to the buzz created by the NewsGator outage and their response to the FeedDemon community.

It certainly generated some buzz. “NewsGator” was the number one search on Technorati yesterday and people have blogged about it big time. The interest that was shown aside. The response from NewsGator in my opinion has been one of the best responses from a large company that I have ever seen. I even received a comment on my previous post from Jack Brewster who is in Tech Support at NewsGator! I have never seen any company communicate to the users of their product in such an open and frank way. Under the same circumstances other large companies would not have even made an apology, let alone tried to explain exactly what happened.
Greg Reinackers Weblog goes into further explanation in regards to the reasons for the outage, detailing the exact events of the outage hour by hour. He ends his post with these words:

But for now – yep, we screwed up. To our customers who were affected – you have my personal apology, and my assurance that we’re doing everything we can to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

In fact I started to feel sorry for the bastards! They are obviously working very hard at delivering a stable client that does have some great features. It would appear that they were trying to improve that when the crash occurred! I really hope that the willingness to provide information and communicate that to users will continue it certainly gives a fresh face to the usual no comment I see from big companies. Well done NewsGator.

I would still recommend FeedDemon to anyone, it is a great RSS reader. I would recommend it even more strongly given their handling and response to the outage. I hope that other companies take a leaf out of their book and start remembering that real people are using their products. Thanks guys keep up the good work.

So What Makes You Different?

Today Technorati posted the State of the Blogosphere for April 2006. It blows me away to think about these statistics. In summary:

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 million blogs.
• The number of blogs doubles every six months.
• The blogoshphere is over sixty times bigger than it was three years ago.
• A new blog is created every second of every day.
• 19.4 million (55%) bloggers are still active three months after their blog was created.
• Every day Technorati tracks 1.2 million posts.

Reference: Technorati Weblog; State of the Blogosphere, Part 1

These statistics are truly amazing to say the least. I think that it will be interesting to see if the growth is sustainable as I think that there is an element of novelty in blogging. The other glaring thing to me is with these types of numbers what makes my blog something that anyone else would want to read? How do I set myself apart from all the other blogs on the planet? Is setting myself apart something that I want to do? Clearly some bloggers just want to blog for themselves or to let their family know what they are up to. Then there is the commercial aspect with big companies jumping on the blog idea.

So I am going to keep asking myself what it is that might make this post something someone else would want to read and keep blogging anyway, even if nobody reads it.

I am also pleased that I am part of the 55% that are still blogging after three months, so thats one feather in my cap. When all is said and done I am blogging for the fun of it and while I am having fun I will keep at it.

On another note there are some interesting things happening with in my community. Sebastian and myself have started another blog. It is called Podcast Periodical. This online magazine is not so much one that we want to write as we want others to contribute to it. We hope that the blog fosters community in blogging and podcasting by sharing resources and networking with other like minded people. Personally I am hoping that it will assist people with questions and queries about podcasting and blogging or just understanding what the whole thing is all about.

This is something that I am quite passionate about, just ask the average person on the street what a blog is and you will get various dumb looks. Now ask them what a podcast is and you will get a “what planet are you on look”. So I am hoping that through this blog we can “get the word out” on what and how of podcasting and blogging. Make sure you check out the site and subscribe I am sure it will be something to watch.