The latest BS from Blogrolling.com

Nov 2nd Sun

How come so quiet? Thanks to everyone for their patience while we sort this mess out.

The short story is that Blogrolling 1.0 is still mostly offline for security reasons. Serving blogrolls, pinging and a couple of other minor functions are back, but you still can’t edit your blogroll, create new blogrolls, that sort of thing.

This is killing us as much as you.

The service will continue to run in sub-standard mode while we work through the code re-write that I talked about last week. I’ve asked my team to see if we can bring back editing and adding to blogrolls while we work on Blogrolling 2.0, but it doesn’t look good at this point.

Sorry that I don’t have better or more detailed news at this point. I will post more about Blogrolling 2.0 once we get closer to the beta in a few weeks.

Thanks again for your patience and support.

/ross

How come we’re so quiet?? I hate bad grammar, but that was too good to pass up! Why should we say anything and waste our time writing an email or posting a thought when the people at Blogrolling.com simply don’t give a damn? These guys are full of CRAP! The rolls are showing, but that’s it, they are not pinging, not in ANY way. They are NOT updated, they won’t update, and we can’t do a thing about it.

They’re going to post MORE as Blogrolling 2.0 Beta gets closer in a few weeks?? I am NOT so sure that there are going to be any interested parties by then!

Sure, it’s a FREE service, and you get what you pay for, right? Let me remind y’all, these are the same people that were NOT free a while back, and they took a lot of folks money for renewal fees, and then announced that they would no longer be charging for their services. And they NEVER offered to refund so much as one penny!

I have a Fred’s Faves page, and many of you are already on it, if you’re not, and would like to be, let me know, because I am seriously considering dumping Blogrolling.com completely. As I said, it’s FREE, you can’t expect too much for that price but NO service is NO service, I don’t care how you cut it!

The Latest update from Blogrolling.com

Current state of affairs… Its been a long week at Blogrolling HQ and while I can’t report that the good ship Blogrolling.com is seaworthy again, I did want to give you all an update before the weekend.

We got hit pretty hard by the forces of evil, so we had to restrict which functions were available via Blogrolling.com. For now, this includes most account and blogroll management features. No changing your passwords, updating your rolls, etc. In the meantime, we are still serving Blogrolls.

Behind the scenes, we’ve got a couple of parallel projects underway.

a) bringing back affected services safely and responsibly. We want to ensure that your data is safe, so we’re doing an extensive review of the affected services, making slight adjustments here and there, and restoring individual services. This won’t be a quick process, so don’t expect to see full functionality restored in the next few days. It may be up to a few weeks before basic services are fully restored. I realize how much this sucks, but we want to make sure that we don’t affect the overall security of the system and the basic dependability of core roll serving. Like I said earlier, we’re committed to keeping the lights on, but they will be dimmed for a little while.

b) Blogrolling 2.0. I had originally scheduled to launch this almost 2 years ago, but then I got involved in some other small projects for Tucows that sucked up 100% of my attention and 100% of the resources I had intended on using for BR2. In the meantime, BR1 kept chugging along, quietly growing and generally doing exactly what it promised to do. Despite this lack of attention, BR1 is *huge* - we served well over 1 billion blogrolls in the last year and have more than 6 times the number of users that we had when we first took the service over wayyy back.

BR2 is intended to be a smaller, simpler version of BR1. You will see a couple of important features improved and a couple of unused features disappear. You will also see a business model attached to BR2. I’ll provide more details closer to launch, but I want to get this out in the open now. It was fine to let BR1 run without a model because we weren’t making a strong investment in it (bandwidth has been our biggest cost over the last three years). Now that we’ve got people assigned to it, the costs have skyrocketed and in the current financial environment, corporate patience for digging big Web 2.0 holes and filling them up with someone else’s money is non-existent. Every dollar that we spend needs to have some ROI attached to it. You have my promise that we’re not going to ruin your Blogrolls with flash ads or something equally stupid - we will be sensitive about how we approach this and we will look for your feedback before pulling the trigger. I will not be party to implementing the business model that killed Blogrolling, rather - I’d love to be part of the community that helped turn it into a shining success.

If you have any comments, just send us a note via twitter to @blogrolling. I’ll be implementing Disqus here as soon as I get a few spare moments to hack it into the template.

Have a great weekend everyone.

/ross

Yep, not having working blog rolls really sucks, but I can’t do anything other than send out updates as I get em. That and seriously consider dumping the SOBs as soon as I can edit once again, and that may be, according to their latest release, a few weeks off… Simply ridiculous..

The story thus far…

Earlier yesterday, we had to take Blogrolling.com entirely offline. Shortly thereafter, we re-started serving blogrolls, but we still haven’t made tools available to manage your blogrolls, set up new ones, sign up for the service, etc. For a while, we were redirecting the Blogrolling home page to our Twitter status page so that we could provide everyone with updates. Now we’re just going to post updates here as they happen. Of course, we’ll continue to monitor Twitter, etc. to provide help, answers, etc.

Drop us a note @blogrolling on twitter if you have any questions.

We’re really sorry for any inconvenience that this has caused, but it is really important that we run with the lights dim while we sort things out.