Dear Ping-o-matic users, I’m Isaac from Automattic. It was a while since anyone wrote on this blog, and I thought I’d fill you in on what’s been going on lately.

I’ve just performed a redesign on the Ping-o-matic website. The new look was launched a few weeks ago, and is meant to increase the usability of the service and make it look a bit more modern and well fitted for the WordPress/Automattic family.

For newcomers, there’s now a welcome message on top of the front page which gives you a Ping-o-matic crash course. Below this, you’ll find the familiar pinging form where you supply your blog details and select the services you want to ping. The whole form has been redesigned to stand out more from the rest of the content on the page, making it easier to see how it all fits together. The vertical space for the services list has been compressed. This list took up a big chunk of the screen before, but has now been compressed to 4 columns which saves a lot of space. …And the action button is now bigger than ever, so you can’t possibly miss it!

As for the Stats page, it’s received a minor update. The graph has been modified to fit with the new color scheme of Ping-o-matic.

The spirit behind the redesign was to give Ping-o-matic a graphical profile on it’s own, with bold colors that makes the service memorable. I also wanted to make it better tied in to the WordPress/Automattic family’s graphical profile and user interface ideas. You’ll notice similar fonts, navigation solutions and a fancy looking footer, as well as a good deal of “under the hood” similarities. Among those are the uses of CSS3 rules like border-radius, which gives people browsing Ping-o-matic in modern browsers a richer (and rounder!) experience.

A few days ago we added Bloglines to our list of RPC ping receivers, worked out a few issues with them, and now they've announced their pinging service.

I'll be adding them to the web form soon.  

I was at Technorati a few days ago and they helped identify some issues where RPC pings might not have been making it downstream under certain conditions. These issues should be addressed now and we'll stay in close contact to make sure if anything else similar comes up nail it sooner.

Thanks for using Ping-O-Matic! 

The first wave of new servers just came online. We’ll be configuring them and moving the site over tonight, so there may be some funkiness in the interim.

UPDATE: Move complete. Let’s see how this new hardware holds up.

Geeklog 1.4 now pings Ping-O-Matic by default. Woohoo!

Imagine my surprise when I visited Grabperf (like I do daily) and saw Ping-O-Matic in the top 20 fastest sites that they’re tracking. You can view a scatter chart of Ping-O-Matic performance and see it tends be right around .20 total which currently puts us behind BBC and ahead of Google search. Cool.

I’m not quite done with the performance tweaks yet, but it will probably be mostly on the outgoing ping side of thing, which shouldn’t effect the graphs that much. Once everything is done on the single box, I’ll start the process of replicating it to the other donated hardware. Performance is nice, but availability is more important.

All of the internal parts of Ping-O-Matic have been switched over to use the new functions I wrote, and I’ll be eliminating more of the old code in the next day or two, which should continue to improve performance.

Sorry for some of the bumps over the weekend, some of you may have caught me while the code was being debugged and seen strange messages or behaviour. As the first “hard part” is now over, these should be a lot less than they used to be.

I just (finally) found the lingering bug that would cause people to get a “you’re pinging too fast” when in fact they actually hadn’t been. It was related to how we stored the latest pings and how new blogs were added to the database.

So far I’ve removed about 400 lines from the code, and taking out more and more. After it’s been broken down to its simplest possible parts I’ll begin replicating it to the other servers.

Ping-O-Matic is running again, however the blog will now be here instead of on the pingomatic.com domain. (To make it easier to distribute the app amoung multiple servers and not have to keep so much synced.)

Sorry for the downtime, it was actually NOT related to the plans for a new architecture, the problem was the pings were overloading the network stack (really) on the old box, so we moved it to a better box and put some protections in front of it.

There will be more updates over the weekend, I’ll be blogging the news as it happens. The hardware from Technorati will finally be brought online and I have a few other optimizations in mind.