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• Tuning Up, Tuning Down - Part 1.5

  Ben 5:15 pm on November 15, 2025 | 0 Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: backflip (2), blinklist, bookmarking services, chipmark, getboo, gravee (2), propeller (2), recent changes, tumblr

  Before I get around to Part 2, we need to take a minor detour to talk about a couple other recent changes. I mentioned in the v1.13 release notes that there were three additions made to the system that I wasn’t going to reveal just yet. For those of you that haven’t figure out what they were, your wait is over:

  We added three new social bookmarking sites to SocialAdr, including GetBoo, Gravee, and BlinkList. They are up and running and ready for you to start using by signing up for accounts and then adding your logins to SocialAdr.

  The ‘tuning down’ part of this post is that we are replacing three services that were starting to cause problems, so the total number of bookmarking services is not actually changing. The services that we’re deactivating are Tumblr, Propeller, and Chipmark. We’d like to bring those services back in the future if we can work through the problems they are causing, but for now we’ll be moving forward with our new services.

  We are also keeping a close eye on Backflip, as they had a server outage and haven’t been able to recover yet. If that service continues to be offline, we will most likely replace it with an alternate service.

   

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• Tuning Up, Tuning Down - Part 1

  Ben 10:33 am on November 14, 2025 | 0 Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: free users (3), more links, share queue (4)

  One of the things that we’ve heard from a few users is that they wish the share queue would stay more full. That’s a reasonable request, since our most active customers can share up to 20 links per day, and they need to if they want their links to be shared in return.

  We’re faced with a pretty basic challenge though, which is that our most active users are the ones most likely to be pumping new links into the system. On top of that, our free users can only have a couple of links going at a time, and can only have them shared twice. Those two items plus a couple of others makes for a difficult situation.

  So how do we address this? There are a number of directions we’re going to tackle this from, and in combination we’re confident they will eliminate any issue.

  First, in the tuning UP department, we’re going to be increasing the number of links that people can have in the system, especially our free users. And secondly, we’ll be tuning up the number of times that each user’s links can be shared.

  These two items will result in more links being available to share, both because there are more going into the system in the first place and also because they will stick around longer once they get there.

  But that’s just the beginning. There are even more changes coming in the ‘tuning down’ department. I’ll explore some of those in Part 2.

   

• SocialAdr v1.13 Released

  Ben 8:20 pm on November 12, 2025 | 0 Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: current release, secret changes, shared bookmarks

  We just rolled version 1.13 of SocialAdr to the production site. The following changes were made in the current release:

  • Added <omitted>*
  • Added <omitted>*
  • Added <omitted>*
  • Fixed a bug on the ‘Shared Bookmarks’ page that occasionally caused an incorrectly reported status

  *We patched in three secret changes. I’ll announce what they are in a future post, but right now they will only be available to people that find them on their own. These are NOT minor.

   

• Here Comes the Wrecking Ball

  Ben 5:02 pm on November 10, 2025 | 0 Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: backlinks (4), history tracking system, performance, performance enhancements, revamping user accounts, scalability

  As I’ve mentioned before, one of the main reasons I was brought on board was to help out with performance and scalability. And let me tell you, we didn’t waste any time getting right into the thick of it.

  In case you haven’t checked the stats, SocialAdr has posted almost 30,000 backlinks to members’ sites. That’s a LOT of linking in a pretty short period of time. We keep track of every individual link: who created the link, who shared the link, what the result was, etc.

  We use that data for all kinds of things like showing you what’s happened to your links and figuring out what’s available for you to share. As you may have guessed, we’re crunching a lot of data to deliver some of the pages on the site. And that translates into a lot of server resources and sometimes, slow response times.

  So naturally, as the new guy, my first suggestion was that we completely rip out the entire history tracking system and rewrite it. To Kane’s credit, he didn’t hang up on me and call the whole thing off. Instead we started talking through how it could work, what impact it would have, and how hard it would be to get done.

  The amazing thing is that less than a week later we rolled out an updated version of the site with a completely revamped history tracking subsystem. You probably saw the unassuming post announcing some performance enhancements; we didn’t make a big deal about it, but it was no minor upgrade.

  If you haven’t already, you’ll definitely be able to tell how much faster the site is. The share queue, the history page, and even the dashboard are much more responsive. Even better, as the number of users and shares increases in the future, we shouldn’t have any trouble handling it in stride.

  Now that we’ve got that behind us, we’re turning our focus to other tasks including keeping the share queue full, revamping user accounts, and enchancing and adding to the bookmarking services.

   

• SocialAdr v1.12 Released - Performance Updates

  Ben 3:28 pm on November 8, 2025 | 1 Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bloglines (2), dashboard, multiply, share queue (4), simpy (2)

  We released version 1.12 of the site last night. The upgrade included the following changes:

  • Redesigned history system, optimized for performance and growth
  • Updated Share Queue (performance)
  • Updated History pages (performance)
  • Updated Dashboard (performance)
  • Updated History - My Bookmarks logic (wasn’t showing complete details)
  • Updated History - Shared Bookmarks logic (hyperlinks now go directly to external bookmarks)
  • Added ability for social bookmarking services to be either temporarily inactivated or fully disabled
  • Updated Bloglines interface (to handle changes on their end)
  • Updated Simpy interface (better error reporting)
  • Updated Multiply interface (to handle changes on their end)
  • Updated Edit Accounts (fixed issue with duplicate accounts appearing)