Archive: PayPerPost
We have a release going out tonight at 10:15. The site will go down for a couple of minutes.
Here's what's new...
- We've added the anchor text on the manage post page for advertisers
- Fixed this error that showed up every once in a while on white colored or available opps
- Added a new feature for administration of auto approvals to help Customer Love
Today we released a few fixes and minor changes to PayPerPost. Please view the release notes for details.
Greetings everybody! I would like to address an issue that occurred yesterday evening and continued throughout the night. The segmentation system in PayPerPost experienced a glitch that for most bloggers caused their number of qualified opps to go down. We have been able to pinpoint the cause of this and we are currently running a process that will fix this problem. You may experience some more oddness with the segmentation this morning while the process finishes running. We should have everything back to normal by lunch time today. I'll make another post to let you know when everything is good to go. And we apologize for the inconvenience.
It's been gnawing away at you this afternoon hasn't it. You definitely noticed it, but you didn't want to say anything just in case you were the only lucky one out there. It just wouldn't do to draw jealous attention from all the other posties, so you just sat there and enjoyed it, hoping it wasn't some accident that would go away in the near future.
PayPerPost.com is now a heck of a lot faster for everyone. There's a bunch of other people out there that have been thinking the same things you have been thinking today I'm sure. Trevor and Larry have been working tirelessly for the past 2 weeks on a massive rewrite of the segmentation engine to speed the site up and cope with PayPerPost.com's continuing meteoric growth, and today we deployed it.
The end result is, of course, a snappier, happier and all round more pleasant feeling PayPerPost.com than ever before.
Well done guys!
Well it seems even the big boys have issues from time to time. Currently Google's Blogspot.com is offline. This is causing us some problems, or more specifically causing Posties some problems.
When you make a post within the system, PayPerPost.com will automatically hit the blog to check certain criteria in the post. We also validate the URL of the post. With BlogSpot down this is causing PayPerPost.com to experience some timeouts and generally slowing things down (if we have a bunch of people trying to make posts in the system hosted on Blogspot, obviously PayPerPost.com is going to wait a while before it timeouts).
So, for the time being if you are using a BlogSpot.com blog we can't accept your posts. As soon as BlogSpot.com gets back online we'll be fine to keep working with Google Blogspot.com hosted blogs.
Sorry, on Google's behalf.
Pete
The PayPerPost blog is at home with its new host and blogging platform, TypePad. We are really excited to take advantage of comments, trackbacks, MovableType, and a host of other features TypePad has to offer. Remember we've split the main PayPerPost blog into four separate blogs — Advertiser, Community, Postie, and Development.
Your RSS feeds (RSS 2.0 and Atom) should still work for all blog posts (I worked with our Super Sysadmin Guru Ninja Mark to make that happen). All four blog feeds are combined into one using FeedBlendr (those guys are cool). You can also grab the individual blog feeds, if that suits your fancy.
Hope you like the new digs!
Technorati Tags: FeedBlendr, new, PayPerPost, PayPerPost blog, RSS, TypePad
I am pleased to announce that we will be moving our blog to TypePad on Monday. We will be splitting this blog into five blogs: Posties, Advertisers, Developers, Community and a summary that includes everything wrapped into one. I am really looking forward to all of the features that Typepad has to offer, most specifically trackbacks and categories.
Some of you may or may not know that when we launched PPP Direct we also launched a special PPP Direct TypePad widget that makes it really easy to install our code. The team over at Six Apart has been great to work with. They are very understanding of Blogger desires and are open to new ideas.
If you haven't checked out their platform and you are considering a switch click here to check it out.
First up, we use URL Trends, as you know, to grab your page ranks. We hit Alexa directly to get your Alexa scores. With many thousands of blogs in the system we are limited on when we can hit both those services to update the scores. This obviously reduces the times that we can live test anything.
With URL Trends we had a number of issues where we were passing 'edge cases' to the service. Some of you suffix your blog URLs with slashes, some dont. Some of you choose to add www. on the front, some dont. Some of you have http:// for a fully qualified URL in the system, some of you don't. Each step of the way, each test we have done, each time we have tried to go live we have found yet more exceptions that we need to account for and that URL Trends need to account for. Joel at URL Trends has been working very closely with us and we are confident now that we have overcome the last hurdle. We will be running the ranking update script shortly, in the middle of the day, to get you all accurate scores as quickly as possible.
Similar issues occurred with Alexa, along with some more insidious ones. For example if you have a blog with little to no traffic at BlogSpot, Alexa will happily tell us that your rank is the same as blogspot.com - obviously that's not the case. So, we've had to build in a lot of code to query on master domains as well as subdomains, and also subdomains with page links (some of you have blogs at somedomain.com/sometopic) to check which is the most accurate score coming back.
Again, we are there now and that will be included in the run happening in the middle of the day today.
I know this is a pain for you all. It's a pain for us too. As angry as some of you are that it's taken so long to get here, we are as frustrated due to you not being able to take opps, and obviously an increased support workload for Karens team. In addition, internally I can honestly tell you that Ted is screaming louder than any of you to get this fixed. We have been doing all that we can, and continue to do so. I am confident we have this thing nailed down once and for all today.
Labels: page rank pr alexa bug
Labels: Rank blog alexa URLTrends
We have thousands of users, with thousands of ways of doing things in the system, some correct, some incorrect. We simply didn't count on some of the ways many of you get things done. That's an oversight on our part. For example, there are still problems today with segmentation on opportunities with some bloggers who are ineligable able to opportunities that they should not have access to, and others who should have access finding themselves locked out.
I'll tackle the latter case first. We use URL Trends to gather information about the blogs in the system and assign their page ranks and Alexa ranks. It's a partnership which has always been astounding. Recently though URL Trends have had problems of their own and we've been working hand in hand with them to resolve these issues as quickly as possible. Joel Strellner, the owner of URL Trends, said it best in an email to me earlier.
"Our entire team sincerely apologize to you and the entire Pay Per Post team and community for the errors. We hope that this issue does not permanently hinder our relationship between our two companies."
The issues are now fixed and within the next 48 hours (because of the way the ranking updates run) you'll start to see the results trickle into your blogger dashboards.
The other issue, that of taking opps and bypassing segmentation, is one that we are currently looking into. Thankfully we are a human based system and our last line of defense will always be the excellent team of dedicated reviewers we have. If you are an advertiser and worried that your opportunities are being snagged by bloggers you don't really want, don't panic! The reviewing team will catch these and reject them.
At the end of the day we are a company and a system that has grown exponentially in size and complexity in an incredibly short period of time. We're still in Beta and there will be kinks to iron out. As a development team we have learned a great deal this past week alone about how our community and marketplace operate and we'll be using that knowledge in the coming weeks to build out a complete set of automated tests to make sure we never again do a deployment with as many issues as this. We're using this as an opportunity to improve the application, improve the output of the development team and totally shore up the platform for the massive growth that we know our future holds for us.
There have been a lot of comments here on the blog and on the boards, both encouraging and scathing. We welcome both. It take's passion on a subject to post a passionate comment about it, regardless of whether that comment's tone is positive or negative. One of the most phenomenal aspects of PayPerPost is our vast and passionate community and I for one am very glad you are all out there to keep us in check and provide us with excellent feedback.
Thanks for bearing with us.
Pete
Labels: release errors
