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Bloglines will be down this evening, Sept 9, 2005, starting at 7PM Pacific time. We will be doing maintenance on some of the backend systems. We expect the downtime to last approximately one hour.

Update: We had to replace some failed hardware during the maintenance. You may notice that some unread counts are off. They will correct themselves after you read your subscriptions. We sincerely apologize for this.

Blogs have given individuals of any and every background the ability to freely speak their minds and share information with anyone who chooses to read it, at any time they wish to do so. Bloglines was created for people as a window to access this world of dynamic content and a way to participate in its creation. We believe blogs have helped enable an open exchange of information that has never before been possible. As some of you may have heard, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is reviewing its regulations concerning political speech on the Internet, including blog activity. Bloglines is committed to the continuation of open exchanges of information and opinions throughout the blogosphere and the Internet in general. Today, the Committee on House Administration is having a hearing on this issue. In the spirit of these beliefs, I have provided the Committee with the following statement. We encourage you to express your opinion on this matter in any forum you choose.

-Mark Fletcher and the Bloglines team

Statement by Mark Fletcher Founder, Vice President and General Manager of Bloglines Concerning Regulation of Political Speech on the Internet Before the Committee on House Administration U.S. House of Representatives September 22, 2005 Chairman Ney and Members of the Committee:      On behalf of Bloglines and our users, I am pleased to provide the following statement concerning regulation of political speech on the Internet. Bloglines, founded in 2003, is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. The company is a property of Ask Jeeves, Inc., a wholly-owned business of IAC/InterActiveCorp, and is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.      We believe it's critical for us to speak out on behalf of individual bloggers who, while empowered by the Internet, have a limited capacity to carry messages to Congress. We commend you and the Committee for convening this hearing and focusing needed attention on this issue.      We urge Congress and the FEC to ensure that the Internet, particularly blog activity, remains free from campaign finance regulation. While regulation of campaign financing plays an important role in maintaining public confidence in our political system, we believe the significant public policy interests in encouraging the Internet as a forum for free or low-cost speech and open information exchange should stand paramount.      Linking to campaign websites, quoting from or republishing campaign materials and even providing a link for donations to a candidate, if done without compensation, should not result in a blog being deemed to have made a contribution to a campaign or trigger reporting requirements.      Blogs permit the expression of and access to a diversity of political opinions and other information on a scale never before seen.  This speech must remain free and not be discouraged by burdensome regulation.  As such, it should be explicit that the activities of bloggers are covered by the press exemption of Sections 100.73 and 100.132.      Should the FEC fail to provide this critical protection to Internet activity, or if courts determine the Commission lacks statutory authority, we urge Congress to promptly move legislation to achieve the goal. Thank you for this opportunity to share our comments on this important issue. *                   *                  *

Today we rolled out some new features to help you keep up with all the information that is important to you.

Hotkeys
If you prefer using your keyboard to mousing around, you'll be happy to know we've added these shortcut keys. You will find this legend at the bottom of each feed display page:

On a personal note, I must say these hotkeys rock! If you are like me and seem to get a gazillion articles in your Bloglines every day, these hotkeys are for you. I used to go through a finger stretching, huff & puff ritual before I reached for my mouse and dove in to Bloglines. No more, thanks to Bloglines' hotkeys. My absolute favorite is 'j' which allows me to jump from article to article instead of scrolling. I can now read my Bloglines in half the time, no joke!

But wait! There's more...

Unread vs. Keep As New
There's a difference between "Unread" articles and those marked "Keep as New" (subtle, but distinct), so you will now see two numbers next to your subscribed feeds in parentheses. The number to the left of the colon represents the articles you have not read/seen before, and the number on the right represents the articles you have manually kept new.

Mobile
For those who enjoy using Bloglines on the run, we've added a couple of features from Bloglines to our Mobile edition.

• First, you can now access enclosure links in blog articles, allowing you to view images or listen to your favorite podcasts from your mobile device.
• Second, you can now use the "Keep as New" option for articles you have previously read, allowing you to scroll through as many articles as you want and come back to them later.

And finally, the ginsu knives of Bloglines …

Universal Inbox
Continuing the rollout of "unique-to-me" features like weather and package tracking, we've partnered with Astrology.com to deliver daily, weekly and monthly horoscopes, and Lottery.com to bring you lottery winning numbers and jackpot values for any state in the USA.

Please let us know what you think about our new features. No need to send email, just post to your blog and our Bloglines saved searches will pick up your feedback.

Robyn DeuPree
Product Manager, Bloglines

We’ve added a couple more improvements to Bloglines, including a sweet new feature for Bloglines Mobile.

Mobile
Do you often find yourself reading Bloglines on your mobile phone with too many feeds and too little time? Well, we’ve got great news. No, we’re not selling you gecko lizard insurance. But we have made it easy for you to create an abbreviated mobile version of your feed list so you don’t have to scroll past dozens of feeds to get to those you have time to read.

To create your mobile feed list, click the Edit link while in the web version, check which subscriptions you want or don’t want displayed in your mobile view and then select your option in the dropdown menu. You can also change this setting by clicking on the Edit Subscription link while viewing any of your feeds.

Another useful option for dealing with a lot of subscriptions is to have Bloglines only display subscriptions that have unread articles. Click on your Account link and look under Feed Options for the setting to show only updated feeds. This applies to both web and mobile versions. In case you’ve never seen Bloglines mobile, here’s a shot of what it looks like on Robyn’s new phone:

Job Search
Are you spending too much time searching for a job and not enough time reading your Bloglines? Add a personalized job search feed from Simply Hired. Click the Add link at the top of your feed list and then select the Jobs link. If you aren’t job hunting, subscribe to www.simplyfired.com for some great stories like the guy who got fired for eating pizza out of the break room fridge. As the slogan says “If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.”

- The Bloglines Team

We're not going to beat around the bush about this. Bloglines performance has sucked eggs lately. Why? In short, Bloglines has been busting at the seams like the Incredible Hulk.

All of us here at Bloglines have been foregoing sleep and social lives over the past several months to keep Bloglines running and preparing for our move to a new access center (with bigger britches and a very elastic waistline).

So hang tight because there's a light at the end of the tunnel. The move will happen soon; we'll keep you posted.

- The Bloglines Team

Bloglines will have a planned outage on Monday, December 19, 2005 in order to relocate to a new data center. Here's our planned schedule for tomorrow:

• 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (10:00pm UTC): Your subscriptions will stop updating with new items.
• 4:00pm PDT (12:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be completely offline. During this time you will not be able to access your account.
• 8:00pm PDT (4:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be back online by this time. New articles posted during the outage will appear in your account.

We look forward to vastly improved hardware capacity and tons of elbow room for growth. Thank you for your patience during this outage.

- The Bloglines Team

Bloglines has completed the relocation to our new data center. Don't panic if some subscriptions haven't started updating with new items yet. Our machines will be catching up with the activity of the blogosphere for the next few hours. We know a lot of you are getting the shakes so we didn't want to keep you from your Bloglines any longer than necessary.

There is also a known issue with some subscriptions showing incorrect unread counts. However, your unread items have not been lost. Clicking on the subscription will display all the unread articles. We are working to fix this.

We'll follow up with a more detailed post when we're more settled in. Thanks again for your patience support during this outage.

- The Bloglines Team

Bloglines was off-line this morning from about 3:42am until 7:45am Pacific Time. Both main database machines crashed at the same time. Despite our best efforts, they would not come back on-line. We back up our databases constantly, and are now running on those backups. Unfortunately, what this means is that if you made any changes to your account in the 7 minute span between 3:35am and 3:42am Pacific Time, those changes may have been lost. We apologize for this and are working hard to ensure this does not happen again.

UPDATE: We need to take the system down for about 10 minutes, starting at 7:15pm Pacific Standard Time (3:15am UTC).

UPDATE 2: We apologize for the extra, unplanned plumber this evening. That was the result of a mistake with the web server configuration files. The plumber apologizes for his error, and we've placed him in a locked box with the hope that this does not happen again.

Mark Fletcher already provided a five part blog/novella on wingedpig.com describing the behind-the-scenes details of our recent datacenter move.  But we also wanted to share how the move has improved the health and well-being of Bloglines for our users.

We're proud to say that Bloglines has experienced tremendous growth, more than tripling subscribers, feeds and articles in less than a year. On January 5th we topped 1 billion articles and we're currently pulling in new articles at a rate of 3-4 million per day.  For those number naysayers out there, keep in mind that we only keep articles from feeds that users have subscribed to (which also keeps our splog count lean).  For these reasons, we consider ours to be the highest quality blogosphere index that exists.

With the system and hardware upgrades now in place, Bloglines users are experiencing across-the-board performance improvements, including increased freshness and faster page loads.  For example, check out the cliff on this graph, courtesy of GrabPERF, showing how the datacenter move helped us drop our page response time from 0.7 to 0.2 seconds.

With the move well behind us, we've got a lot more time to spend improving Bloglines.  We've been listening to what our users want to see and we're already working on killer stuff (just wait and see).

The Bloglines team

In addition to feedback, we often receive love letters from our users (keep 'em coming!). But we get an extra special warm fuzzy feeling when Bloglines has been recognized by the media.

• Business 2.0's The Next Net 25
• Chicago Tribune's 50 best Web sites: SERVICES
• Designtechnica's The Best of Web 2.0 review

- Robyn DeuPree, Sr. Product Manager