Who wants lunch?

Check out lunchSpark, a new social network app with a focus on one of my three favorite meals of the day (lunch). lunchSpark has a comprehensive list of eating establishments searchable by location; after you create a profile, you can see who else is in the area with similar interests, and hook up for a meal.

lunchSpark wanted to include supplemental information on each restaurant, whether it was a national chain or a local establishment. In order to do accomplish this, lunchSpark is incorporating user-generated content accessed through Blogdigger's search API. By pulling a search result feed formatted in RSS, lunchSpark was able to quickly incorporate highly relevant blog content into their site.

Here's my profile on lunchSpark (if you're in the area, let me know, I'm often free for lunch), and here's the page for Max's, home of the best schwarma in all DC (scroll down for the Blogdigger entries). I'll eat there anytime.

Welcome Podloco!

Blogdigger is proud to be working with Podloco, a resource site for podcasts with a local focus. Podloco helps publishers create and publish their podcasts and connect with their target audience. Podloco has an extensive directory of podcast content, which is powered by Blogdigger's Media Search.

Podloco needed a quick and simple way to get relevant content for their podcast directory, without going out and finding podcasts, indexing their content and building a search engine for them. Using Blogdigger's partner feeds, Podloco was able to quickly populate their directory using a flexible keyword taxonomy. Since Podloco's directory is based on keywords, they can update or add to their directory at any time and Blogdigger's Media Search categorization takes care of the rest.

Check out Podloco, and if you're interested in working with Blogdigger, please, let us know!

Four Things

I'm sure you've chanced across the Four Things meme making its way around the blogosphere. I was quite touched to find a few folks, Jeremy Pepper and Andrea Weckerle to be specific, who included Blogdigger on their list of sites they visit every day! Thanks guys, if you ever need anything, just let me know!

Do you use Blogdigger? Don't keep it a secret, tell a friend and spread the word.

New Advertising - What do you think?

We're testing out some new advertising on our search results pages. In place of sponsored links along the right-hand side of the results, we're displaying image ads. We're using a new advertising system, so please let us know what you think; we want to make sure the advertising is complimentary to the rest of the site experience.

We'll be testing several different advertising options over the next few days/weeks, so please let us know your thoughts. Thanks!

Looking for Feed Feedback

We recently pushed some updates to our feed advertising system. The system is designed to ensure that an ad is only displayed at specific intervals. It seems that the changes may have thrown a monkey wrench into things, and some folks are reporting multiple views of the same ad. I'm hoping that this will stabilize over the next few days, but if you are seeing weird behavior, please get in touch so we can do our best to fix it. Users of Thunderbird are of particular interest, as we've gotten a number of reports from folks using Thunderbird of seeing multiple ads with no new posts.

Thanks!

FeedFlare API

FeedBurner just announced their FeedFlare API, which lets third parties (like Blogdigger) integrate their services so FeedBurner users can add them to their feeds.

I did some quick coding and added link counts via Blogdigger's Link search to FeedFlare. You can see an example of what the result looks like by taking a look at my personal blog's feed.

To add Blogdigger Link Search counts to your FeedBurner feed, add the URL

http://www.blogdigger.com/bd-linkflare.xml

as a custom FeedFlare unit on your FeedBurner FeedFlare page (you have to log in to FeedBurner, go to Optimize, then FeedFlare).

I've got a few more FeedFlare's planned...the next one will likely involve FeedBurner's geotags and Blogdigger Local...stay tuned. If you've got other ideas for how to integrate Blogdigger's data into FeedFlare, just let me know!

On Performance and Scalability

If you're an avid follower of the all-seeing, all-knowing GrabPerf, or just use the Blogdigger web site a lot, you may have noticed we've been sucking wind quite a bit lately. A number of factors have combined to push usage of Blogdigger to new levels. Although I haven't blogged much about it, addressing this rapid growth has been pretty much the main focus of my time over the past two months. We have made several improvements, each of which, for one reason or another, soon became irrelavent as site usage continued to increase*. We pushed out some changes last night, which seem to have made things happy for now (fingers crossed, no jinxes); Feb. 1 was our highest traffic day yet, which says to me that if we can keep the site up and running, we've got an audience just waiting to use the service.

Folks talk about scalability, etc., but the truth of the matter is, when you're running on limited resources (Blogdigger currently runs on two boxes), you can design your software to be as scalable as you like, but until you have the money to grow your infrastrucuture, it's a bit of a moot point. I'd argue that is a good thing; it's easy to take a system, throw more hardware at it, and walk away without really attempting to understand where things are going wrong. The first step in addressing scalability should be to look at the application, your deployment, configuration, etc., and see if you can improve things without adding more hardware. From what I've seen, most problems in software development come from misuse or misconfiguration of a software component, rather than limited resources. In other words, sometimes you don't need another database server, you just need more database connections in your pool.

Just so you know, we're continually monitoring the site for performance, and are always looking at ways to make things better. If you have ideas, questions, comments, please don't hesitate to let us know.

* - As an example, after we made a performance enhancement sometime in December, Bloglines started up their new crawler. Bloglines new crawler is a hungry little bugger; it likes to visit each of it's feeds twice an hour, independant of any other variables such as whether the feed has recently updated/pinged, how frequently new stuff is available on a feed, or what the ttl value for the feed is set to. Another example, just a few days after we pushed out a really nice performance enhancement (Steven from Grabperf even emailed me to check if we'd gotten more boxes) one of our partner sites, Webjay, went and got acquired by Yahoo.