News archive

Length Matters 2007-08-16 18:21:52

There has been an expressed desire for feeds longer than 12 hours, and our current thoughts on the matter is that it can't be done without ads/sponsorship. We understand that in some cases a 1 day or 3 day feed would get you to the next work day or past the weekend, but at some point it just makes more sense to catch up by going to the web site. Keep in mind, too, that our feed retention is already much longer than the sites we aggregate. The main issue is that feeds get loaded so often that making them larger multiplies the load on the server. Someone with Safari set to check our 12 hour feed 24*7 would actually suck down over 4 times as much data if we had a 3 day feed they only checked 24*5! Given how sparingly we show ads on the site, it should come as no surprise that we're not making money on this, and the RSS feed is our ultimate loss leader by being completely ad-free. So if people would be willing to put up with ads in order to get a bigger feed, let us know and we'll try it out if the demand is great enough. We'd also love to hear from anyone willing to directly sponsor a larger feed, which would hopefully result in something less annoying than most ads that randomly get served up.

We Missed You Too! 2007-08-15 13:26:14

We were hoping to creep by with just our tails between our legs, but some of you pointed out we weren't updating for nearly 24 hours (nearly all of Tuesday). On the plus side, if there is a plus side, the timeline of missed releases from the sites we aggregate is more like half a day. We last had an outage like this over two years ago, but the way things went bad this time were totally different, so the steps we took then didn't save us now (solution: more steps! :-). Please take this unfortunate opportunity to visit our upstream suppliers and see what you missed, and also see a lot of their site clutter we feel won't be missed at all.

Disgraceful Developer of the Year 2007-07-30 20:17:40

We've seen a recent spurt of dangerous software releases and they've seemingly all been related to one company: Kewlbox. What they appear to do is take Flash games, often developed to advertise for a large company, and package them into apps that do all kinds of un-Mac-like things. We highly recommend you avoid anything produced by Kewlbox. We also suggest contacting the large company that funded the bad software if you mistakenly download something from Kewlbox that does questionable things to your computer. It's a real shame to see software like this still gets regularly produced, and we really hope this "award" never has to be presented again.