Simpy Chichimichi

Maintenance: Short Downtime

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:00:31 -0400

Simpy will another 10-minute break today at 14:00 EST to finalize hardware upgrade from the other day.

Maintenance Today

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:09:39 -0400

Simpy will take a 10-minute break today at 14:00 EST for some backend server love. For the curious, one of Simpy's server's guts will be moved to a new body in hopes of increasing stability and removing surprise outages.

Simpy's Fourth Birthday

Mon, 26 May 2008 14:29:45 -0400

If I posted about Simpy's 3^rd Birthday on May 16, 2007, what does that mean? It means that I am late with posting about Simpy's 4^th Birhtday! Indeed, Simpy has been around for almost half a decade. Actually, it's been around longer, but it has been over 4 years now that it has been public. Still no cake...

Downtime Tonight

Tue, 6 May 2008 20:37:48 -0400

Simpy will take a little break tonight, as some of its components get upgraded. Last week we upgraded one of the servers, before that we got more memory, the other day we quickly upgraded the caching component, and tonight the component that indexes and searches bookmarks, notes, groups, and people is getting a boost. The service should be down for 2 hour maximum.

Maintenance Today

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:17:07 -0400

Simpy will be unavailable between 2 and 3 PM EST today, April 29, 2008 - it's time to upgrade some hardware.

Bad Memory

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:47:06 -0400

Ouch, ouch, up and down, up and down. That would be Simpy over the last 24-48 hours. Why is this happening? In short, we've got more memory, but it looks like the new memory is bad, causes server crashes, and needs to be replaced. While things are running, they are indeed nice and fast, faster than before. Because this is a case of bad memory and memory can be replaced only by shutting one of the crucial servers down, we'll have to take things down a few more times. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Announcement: Simpy OSX Dashboard Widget

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:50:36 -0400

I just posted about Safari Stats on Simpy. What about Mac users regardless of the prefered browser? That number is 5.36% in the last 30 days.

If you are among the 5.36% Simpy Mac users, here is something for you/us - a brand new Simpy dashboard widget for OSX (there is a screenshot behind this links, too). The widget lets you search your Simpy bookmarks directly from OSX.

Thank you, Andu!

More Memory, More Speed

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:27:14 -0400

Things have not been this bad in a long time. If you looked at the screen shot there, you may have noticed just how little memory that server has. This will be changing soon. The memory is in, and I just need to schedule for some down time one of these days.

Once the memory upgrade is done, I think we'll all see even faster Simpy.

Usage: IE6 vs. IE7 vs. IE8

Sun, 9 Mar 2008 15:54:29 -0400

Update: More recent numbers for IE8 and Firefox 3.0, as well as Safari Stats.

It's interesting, I've been watching the usage of Internet Explorer 6 vs. Internet Explorer 7 over on Simpy, waiting for the day when I can say that there are more Simpy IE7 users than IE6 users. Well, that day has come - it happened yesterday, actually. Over the last 30 days, of all Internet Explorer users, 50.05% were using IE7, and 49.39% were using using IE6. What's in the remaining half a percent? All kinds of older IE versions, of course, but also IE8. Yes, IE8 showed up on Simpy on March 6th, 2008 for the first time, and makes us for a whopping 0.01% of all Simpy IE users. I am sure this percentage will grow nicely in the coming month.

New Featurette: Explore Bar

Fri, 7 Mar 2008 01:00:34 -0500

Here is a little new feature that was just added earlier today (no, uh, yesterday already). I can't think of a good name for this, so for now I'm calling it "explore bar". Let's just look at the screenshot first.

(click to enlarge)

When you click on a bookmark tag, whether yours or somebody else's, you will see this gray box with several (3 currently) options that let you explore other areas of Simpy using that tag you just clicked on. Concretely, you can:

Simply look at everyone's bookmarks using the current tag
See the list of people who, based on the analysis of their bookmarks, look like they might know a thing or two about the current tag. We assume they are experts on the tag/topic, of course.
See the list of Groups that have something to do with the current tag you used

This is not limited to tags. When you perform any kind of a bookmark search, the same options will pop-up. The idea is to let people get to know other parts of Simpy, easily expand their search to everyone's bookmarks, quickly see what other users they may want to look at, perhaps put them on their Watchlist or invite them to a Group, etc.

I circled 2 "experts" in the above example. The tag I was looking at was "subway". Simpy showed me several "subway experts". I don't know all those people, but I do know the two that I circled. I actually do know those two people in real life, they are good friends, and I happen to know they do know about subways (in New York). Thus, this is a good example of this little new feature actually providing something accurate and useful.

Any feedback? Thoughts? Room for improvement?

Maintenance Tonight

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:15:54 -0500

Tonight, Simpy's servers will be busy doing some maintenance work. The service will be unavailable for about 1 hour.

Shareaholic Adds Simpy Support

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:40:27 -0500

A few days ago, Jay Meattle announced a new version of Shareaholic v1.3.3. What is Shareaholic? It's a nifty Firefox that includes support for bookmarking in Simpy: "Shareaholic makes it easy for you to submit the web page you're on to your favorite sharing or bookmarking service"

You can get Shareaholic from shareaholic.com or from the official Firefox add-ons site's shareaholic page.

Maintenance Tonight

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:26:50 -0500

This weekend, Simpy's servers will be busy doing some maintenance work. On Saturday night (in EST time zone), the service will be unavailable for about 1 hour. The maintenance work will continue even after the service becomes available, and will last until some time on Monday. This should not have any serious impact on your Simpy usage, though it may slow Simpy down a little bit. After the maintenance is done, the service should actually be faster than before.

Blocking OnlyWire, SocialPoster, and others

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:22:52 -0500

Here is a quick announcement of some upcoming weekend changes:

I am really dropping adsense. Those who like Simpy for what it offers won't be bothered by this.
I am now also considering blocking bookmarks that enter Simpy via spam-infested services, such as OnlyWire, SocialPoster, social-bookmark-script.de and anyone else I come across. Are you using any of these services with Simpy? Let me know if you are.

Simpy Release: Login Change, Group Search and Profile Images

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:32:17 -0500

Regular Simpy users who didn't tell Simpy to "remember them" (so they don't have to re-enter their username and password) must have already noticed that, after logging in, you no longer get sent to Simpy's front page and instead end up on your profile page. This is something that enough people have requested over time that I decided to make this change. I haven't heard any complaints since this change was made about 48 hours ago. I assume this means this change is working well for everyone?

There have been some improvements around search within a Group, too, so if you belong to any Groups, you will see search refining via Related Tags works now. Also, Group members now have their little icons shown next to their names, and clicking on those takes you to those people's profiles. Here is an example (look at the right side of the page).

How do you like having little icons next to people's names? Should Simpy have more of that in other areas of the site?