BlogWatcher performance problems

Some of you may have noticed some rather severe performance problems with BlogWatcher over the past few days. Sorry about that.

I've put in some temporary measures that I think will help in the short term. A bit longer term, I'm looking into upgrading some of the software on the server, to see if that will help. And, of course, if the thing really catches on, such that my virtual host environment can't handle the load any more, I may have to look at moving it to a new machine. But I couldn't do that unless I were able to get revenue from it, some how. So that's a long way down the road.

I have added one minor new feature, but I doubt that anyone reading this will be able to make much use of it. In most news readers (this one included) the various news sources need to be polled every once in a while to see if there are any new posts. In order to be "friendly" to those remote sites, it's considered to be impolite to check more often than once or twice an hour. So that's what I do, which means that it can be up to an hour before you see a new post show up in your list.

The new feature I've added is support for something called a "ping." What that means is that, if your blog software supports it, you can have it send a special message to BlogWatcher whenever a post is updated. BW will then check almost immediately (within 5 minutes) instead of waiting for the next scheduled update. So anybody who uses BW to read your posts will see it much sooner.

So if your blog software supports pings, I'd appreciate it if you could add http://blogwatcher.thebaileys.name/ping.php to your list of ping servers. I've already configured the varous blogs that I host to perform this function.

If you have no idea what the above paragraphs are trying to say, then don't worry about it. ;)