What a day! It turns out the co.mments server had an obscure bug, very simple to fix but also hard to identify. I noticed that bug before, but it happend so infrequently that I couldn’t determine when or why it happens. Today, it started showing up much more frequently on many WordPress blogs.

The bug causes the server to enter an infinite loop, eat up memory and stop processing requests. Tracking a conversation on one of the many blogs that exhibit this behavior caused part of the server to crash, and instead of seeing an error message you would get no response. It happened on too many blogs at once, that all that load caused the entire server to crash repeatedly.

To add insult to injury, the load on the server was so high it would take several minutes to restart, and then a few more minutes to come crashing down. Unfortunately, my attempts to keep it running while fixing the bug only worsened the situation, and the entire site was down for most of the day.

Thankfully, once I found it, the fix was easy. The bug is squashed, co.mments is up and running, speedy and responsive, and has already caught up with all of the day’s comments. No data lost.

We’re back to normal. Thank you for your patience.

Your tracking page and tracking feed are for your own use. But what if you want to share your tracking list with others?

Now you can do that in three different ways. Your public page shows all the conversations you are currently tracking, and there’s also a public Web feed you can share with others. Your account settings page shows where your public page and public Web feed are.

You can also share your tracking list on your blog, Web page or any other place that allows you to use JavaScript. Your settings page includes a short snippet you can paste into any HTML page to show your tracking list.

You asked for e-mail alerts, so I added two types of e-mail alerts. Both provide the same information as the Web feed, but in a slightly different way.

Digest e-mail alerts send you an e-mail with a list of comments in all the conversations you are following. You will receive an e-mail that groups several conversations together, an easy way to be notified. If you can’t check your Web feed often, or want to receive notifications through cell phone or PDA, digest e-mail alerts are a good choice.

Individual e-mail alerts send you e-mail alerts for each individual conversation. You will receive more e-mails than digest. If you use your e-mail client to group (or thread) e-mails, then you can keep track of all comments from the same conversation. This screen shot is GMail grouping two e-mail alerts for the same conversation:

To start receiving e-mail alerts, you need to follow these four steps:

1. First, head over to your your account settings page and click the link to verify your e-mail address.
2. Check your inbox, in a few minutes you will receive an e-mail from co.mments.
3. Click the link in the e-mail to verify your e-mail address. You’re now ready to receive e-mail alerts.
4. Again, head over to your your account settings page, click the “Send Alerts” button and choose whether you want digest or individual e-mail alerts.

For security reasons, you’ll need to verify your e-mail address once, and every time you change your e-mail address.

Afterwards, you can turn e-mail alerts on and off at any time, and you can always switch from digest to individual and back.

I just got hold of a Mac G4, ran a few quick fixes, and as of today, co.mments work with Safari.

If you’re curious to know, I’m testing co.mments with:

• Firefox 1.5 (my main browser)
• IE 6 (the other browser)
• Safari 2.0
• Opera 8.5
• Konqueror 3.5
• Lynx 2.8

Yep, we’ve been TechCrunched. This is old news by now, at least at the rate the blogopshere is moving, but still bears repeating. Lots of positive comments, so I guess we’re on to something good.

As Michael says, “The site is a bit raw and unstable”. After all, it started from a small project to scratch an itch, to solve a problem I had. For a while, I ran it on my computer, checking for new comments every morning, before I realized it begs to be shared with more people.

How many more people? It grew from two to ten, and then Scoble and MetaFilter posted about it … and the server crashed. The rest of the week was an excercise in patience, as it was barely keeping up with the load. It took a few more weeks to get things straightened up.

Last week it was finally getting ready for prime time. I’m glad to see it’s managing well so far, but then you’d expect that from open source technologies.

And the more people use it, the better feedback we get to keep improving. I especially like Michael’s suggetions:

As co.mments evolves, there are a number of features I’d like to see added. First is a way to tag posts while bookmarking them for easier search later, as well as grouping with other users’ bookmarks by tag. There also should be more social aspects in general - for example, I’d like to know if others (and who, and how many) are also tracking a post.

One unavoidable issue - you can’t hit the bookmark button unless you are on the permanent URL for a post. Just being on Techcrunch.com, for example, won’t work. A nice feature would be a drop down list of all posts that are included on a URL (which would be easy to do by looking at the RSS for a page) if you aren’t on the permanent URL page for a post.

All better ways to help you stay on top of the conversations. That’s the official co.mments moto. And yes, there will be more great stuff coming down the road.

To keep the disruption as short as possible, maintenance has been scheduled for Sunday night, 11pm Pacific. The server will be down for a couple of hours, to make some updates to the database and core libraries. What’s waiting for you on Monday are a few new improvements.

Once again we’ll be going down for maintenance for a couple of hours this weekend, I’ll let you know of the exact time in advance. This time to introduce the following new features:

All comments in your feed. When you’re tracking a new conversation, co.mments doesn’t add any existing comments to your RSS feed. Instead, it waits until new comments are available. I know several people found it confusing, and it doesn’t seem as useful as I though it would be. Once the change is in place, your RSS feed will collect all comments from the conversations.

More aggressive comment tracking. There’s a lag between the time a new comment is posted and when co.mments finds it. A few key changes to the algorithm will shorten this lag, especially for blogs that have active discussions going on.

Ping service. An even better way to reduce the lag, by letting blogs ping co.mments when a new comment is posted. Once operational, and if you enable the ping service on your blog, new comments will show up in a matter of minutes. We’re going to start with WordPress and MovableType, then Blogger.

Better documentation. We have a Blog and a Wiki. It’s a great way to get involved in what’s happening, learn new tricks, talk about features you want, report bugs that need to be fixed. More details later this week.

And as always a few behind the scenes improvements that you won’t notice, but will improve the service.

Posted by Assaf in Announcements, Mar 3, 2006. 5 Comments