http://blogdex.net/news/ en-us 2004-10-07T20:09:48-05:00 2005-03-07T14:06:01-05:00 As of Tuesday afternoon, one of the main storage machines at the Media Lab had a major hard drive failure, and everything had to be restored from tape. Unfortunately, one of the major parts of Blogdex runs from this hard drive, and can't be restored until it's back up (I... http://blogdex.net/news/04/10/07blogdex_not_updating.asp cameron 2004-10-07T20:09:48-05:00 Blogdex uses the Apache::ASP perl-script as a scripting engine to build its various dynamic pages. While browsing the configuration variables for another project I'm working on, I noticed a peculiar setting I hadn't seen before: CompressGzip. By switching one variable sitewide, most pages on Blogdex will now be sent compressed.... http://blogdex.net/news/04/10/03blogdex_adds_gzip_support.asp cameron 2004-10-03T17:03:57-05:00 Over the past few days Blogdex has remained silent. I didn't know this because I've been at a conference without (gasp) any sort of network access. After a bit of debugging I realized that the weblog cache table of the database had become corrupt, so nothing was coming in or... http://blogdex.net/news/04/05/29downtime.asp cameron 2004-05-29T22:39:08-05:00 Peter Caputa has written a little piece on what he believes is a flaw in the Blogdex ranking technique: www.whizspark.com/blog Peter is completely right, this technique can be used to drive a post to the top of the index (as he has so aptly shown). Since the day Blogdex debuted,... http://blogdex.net/news/03/12/22on_blogdex_exploitability.asp cameron 2003-12-22T01:39:07-05:00 I've added two new RSS features allowing people to track both sites and weblogs via a simple RSS feed. Check the sidebar for links to various RSS feeds. Link Diffusion Any link's diffusion can now be tracked using the page /xml/track.asp. First find the link diffusion page by searching for... http://blogdex.net/news/03/08/10announcing_tracking_syndi.asp cameron 2003-08-10T16:27:31-05:00 As you might notice, every URL on blogdex is now being rewritten to the new url for Blogdex: http://blogdex.net This is due in large part to a kind gift from Jimmy Wales, the former owner, to whom we are extremely thankful. The reason that blogdex.net was chosen is that MIT... http://blogdex.net/news/03/07/06domain_name_change.asp cameron 2003-07-06T15:35:03-05:00 Blogdex was down from 4:30pm until 7:30pm tonight because MySql had all of its sockets open. Restarting the database solved the problem, but I'm checking to see why the error occured.... http://blogdex.net/news/03/06/05mysql_error.asp cameron 2003-06-05T19:23:43-05:00 Over the next couple of weeks Blogdex will be undergoing some backend upgrades. Some machines have become free for my use here, so technically speaking we'll finally be in the year 2001. The following transitions will be happening: Web server: Moving from a dual PIII-500 running Win2K and IIS to... http://blogdex.net/news/03/04/12infrastructure_changes.asp cameron 2003-04-12T17:16:24-05:00 I apologize for the number of useless links today. I have been working on the backend recently, trying to make it more reliable, and have somehow introduced a bug that is causing it to parse old, dead weblogs as if they were new. I'm correcting for the error, and the... http://blogdex.net/news/03/03/27taking_the_garbage_out.asp cameron 2003-03-27T12:39:57-05:00 One of the biggest problems with RSS for a dynamic site like Blogdex is that the content of individual entities will change over time. Over the course of a day, the description for a site in the top 10 may change up to 30 times as different weblogs link to... http://blogdex.net/news/03/03/21rss_and_uniqueness.asp cameron 2003-03-21T18:12:51-05:00 After integrating an RSS client into my workflow, I've started to realize some of the different ways in which service from Blogdex could improve, a few of which I'll be testing over the next few days. The first order of business is making the page If-Modified-Since compliant, which after many... http://blogdex.net/news/03/01/20new_rss_features.asp cameron 2003-01-20T23:01:42-05:00 Some have noted (in email and on their blogs) that Blogdex has been spammed. This is not the case, and has never been. Every once in a while, web hosting services get acquired, or shut down a number of sites that were weblogs. In their place, the hosting service puts... http://blogdex.net/news/02/12/02blogdex_and_spam.asp cameron 2002-12-02T18:05:36-05:00 Somehow I mistakenly deleted the html stripping in the RSS feed, which was causing all kinds of erroneous ampersands. The bug has been fixed, and things should be back to normal.... http://blogdex.net/news/02/11/18rss_feed_fixed.asp cameron 2002-11-18T16:46:34-05:00 For those interested parties, you can watch Blogdex do its work through the agent logs. I use these to keep track of progress and errors, but there's no reason it shouldn't be public. In the future I'll be trying to expose as much of the internal operation of Blogdex as... http://blogdex.net/news/02/11/04blogdex_in_action.asp cameron 2002-11-04T20:09:27-05:00 Search functionality is now available. I'm using MySql's full-text search methods which are quick but offer very little in the way of performance tuning. Results for multiple word queries are forced to be boolean OR across whatever dataset is being searched. The search page can be found here: Blogdex Search... http://blogdex.net/news/02/11/03search_added.asp cameron 2002-11-03T22:11:56-05:00