Happy Holidays From BlogShares!
Here's hoping you and yours are having a healthy and happy December, and are able to enjoy whatever holidays you hold dear. Real Life™ has caught up with many of us the last few weeks, so you may not have seen a lot of development or new posts here. However, we're still chugging away behind the scenes on things like index cleaning (removing dead blogs in bulk, nearly a million delisted in the last five weeks) and optimizations (code improvement, data archiving).
Thanks to tremendous work from Friendly Wholesale Bonds, Beverly Shaw, and ChrisB, our fund for a new database box has seen a healthy movement towards our $6,000 goal. Thank you, Rich, Bev, and Chris, and thank you as well to all the generous folks who have participated and helped B$ get closer to the new box!
My personal apologies for not being able to get the next community IRC Summit together. I've had some family issues that have kept me busy lately, and I've been unable to tackle all the work that goes into putting such a large gathering together. Don't fret, though, we will have a Summit in the near future, probably some time after New Years if all goes well, where we'll deal with many subjects, including fine-tuning and improving Ideas Math.
You may have noticed that we've put new blog addition (from our spiders) on hold. We were relying on the FeedMesh ping list to receive blog pings, but with the demise of PubSub, FeedMesh has gone offline. We have a couple of other ping lists / clouds that we can use, but we have unfortunately discovered that the urls pinging are very, very high in non-blogs and spam. We'd slaughter the index quickly if we blindly accepted these listings without a serious rewrite to our current code.
We are working on refining our automated ping reading, but until we can build, test, and implement such a system, the automatied pinging will remain offline. You can still add blogs yourself with Add Site. You can also use the Add Site bookmarklet (drag it to your toolbar) to quickly add a blog you are viewing. It fills in blog title and url for you, just double check and submit. We've just added Sigma and Chip rewards for your additions, awarding you 1 Sigma point and 20 chips for each URL you add. We are logging every addition, so be certain you are adding a blog and not non-blogs or spam. The BSEC will be notified if abuse is found.