About 3 hours ago ReadWriteWeb broke the story that Yahoo is killing MyBlogLog next month. All I can say at this stage is… MyBlogLog users we have your back. Watch this space for an announcement soon.

Mark Maunder – Feedjit Founder & CEO

Hello Feedjiteers! As of today you must have the Live Traffic Feed installed to be included in the Geoblogosphere. We are making this policy change in anticipation of a big release we’re doing in the coming weeks. This won’t affect 90% of you because you already have the live traffic feed installed along with our other widgets. The LTF is by far our most popular widget. For those of you that aren’t watching your visitors arrive in real-time yet, you can get it free here!

On Thursday evening we launched a new website screening process for the Geoblogosphere (GB) and a few new features to go with it. We have integrated the GB with Google’s safe browsing API which means that we automatically filter out websites that are flagged as Malware or are on Google’s blacklist. We are also using several other blacklists to determine which sites are bad and should not be included in the GB.

We have also changed our policy and are no longer allowing adult sites in the GB. Before Thursday we allowed adult sites in the GB but let our visitors filter them out using a family filter, which was enabled by default. We have now removed the family filter and we don’t allow adult sites in the GB anymore.

We are also aggressively tackling referrer spam. Referrer spam is when someone pretends to arrive at your site from a web site they are trying to promote. They use a piece of malicious software to send your Feedjit Live Traffic Feed (LTF) a fake referrer so that their link appears in your LTF. We have been quietly black-listing sites that do this for about a year now. Thursday’s launch includes an update to the referrer spam LTF code that makes it much harder to send the LTF fake referrers.

Please note: There are companies on the web that will sell you software to spam the Feedjit LTF. Some of them have even created videos on YouTube describing how to use their software to specifically spam Feedjit widgets.  If we detect that you have spammed the LTF or any of our other products, we black-list your website for life. We already have several thousand websites that are in our black-list. We may share this list with other partner websites which will cause your website to be black-listed there too. Please consider carefully before you decide to engage in referrer spamming.

On a happier note: We also added a much-requested feature that lets our bloggers and webmasters see where they rank in the Geoblogosphere. If you would like to see where your website ranks in the GB, you can visit this page. We will also tell you if your site has been listed in Google’s safe browsing black-list, has been flagged for referrer spam, if your site is considered adult, or if you are listed in any of our other black-lists. We determine which city your blog or website is the most popular in and then show you where you rank for each of those cities.

As a reminder: You can still manage your privacy by clicking “Options/Ignore my browser” at the bottom of any of our LTF widgets. You can also delete entries from your IP address by clicking “Watch in Real-Time” at the bottom of the LTF and “Remove Your IP” on the real-time page.  You can also change the location we display for you by visiting our Change Location page.

Feedjit remains committed to respecting your privacy and providing a safe and spam-free browsing experience for all our members.

Mark Maunder – Feedjit Co-Founder & CEO.

Feedjit is having a Black Friday Thanksgiving sale where we’re knocking 50% off our monthly and yearly Feedjit Pro membership prices for 4 hours only. If you’re not American, and most of our users are outside the USA, Black Friday is a crazy time we have around here where stores have the biggest sales of the year. So we decided to have a sale too.

Check the countdown timer on our home page for details on when the sale starts. We won’t be running another special like this for a long time – at least until November next year, so you really want to take advantage of this. Once again, we’re only running this for 4 hours starting at 8am tomorrow morning Mountain Standard Time (GMT -7 hours).

And if you’re American… Happy Thanksgiving!

We experienced a server outage this evening that lasted approximately 1.5 hours starting at 6:10PM US Pacific time. We are back up and running now at 100% capacity. I’d like to apologize for any inconvenience this caused you. We are still investigating the cause and will take steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Mark Maunder – Feedjit Founder & CEO.

I’ve had two of our newest members ask me this today via email so I thought I’d post a quick blog entry:

There are actually very few limits on your account. You can add as many websites or blogs as you would like to your Pro account and we’ll show all their real-time statistics without charging you a cent more.

The only limit is 1 Million page views across all your domains per month. That’s about 40 times the maximum allowance many other (realtime and non-realtime) services provide – and they limit the number of sites you can add.

At Feedjit we spend a lot of time feeding and caring for our servers and making sure they run as fast and as efficiently as possible. We can then pass that benefit on to you by offering you a great service with huge monthly allowances for the price of three cups of coffee per month.

Don’t forget about our Halloween special that is on right now. It’s running until, well, Halloween of course and it gives you a full 30% off our usual monthly and yearly pricing.

Kerry, my co-founder is a Halloween nut. Well actually she’s nuts about any excuse to have a party. So she’s been working most of tonight to put together some crazy art-work for Halloween week on Feedjit – and we just launched it. We’re having a huge 30% off sale on both yearly and monthly Feedjit Pro memberships this whole week. I hope the spooky site doesn’t scare you too much.

Keep an eye on the blog – more about the new Feedjit product coming soon!

I’m getting emails from our friends out there wondering why we’ve ‘gone dark’ and asking what we’re working on. We’ll have more details about what we are working on soon. But for now :

1. We’re ridiculously excited about it

2. We’re going back to our roots and focusing on what you truly love about Feedjit

3. I think you’re going to love it too!

So if you wonder why our Twitter feed is quiet or why the blog has gone quiet, it’s because we’re rushing to get a new killer product out the door that you’re going to really, really like.

Mark & Kerry – The Feedjit Founders.

Hi Feedjiteers.

There was a fire at Fisher Plaza data center this morning. Rest assured that all your traffic feeds, widgets and Pro data was unaffected and is safe and sound. We are not based at Fisher Plaza but are based out at Lynnwood, about 15 miles North of Seattle.

However our credit card processor, Authorize.net has been severely affected. We could not process any new Pro signups for the last 8 hours. Authorize.net just came back online though and we are now successfully processing monthly and yearly signups. I’ve already emailed the users who tried to sign up this morning to let them know we’re processing cards again.

You can read about the fire at Fisher Plaza here. Companies affected include Authorize.net, Bing, Geocaching.com, Bartell Drugs and many more.

Mark Maunder

Feedjit.com Founder & CEO

Updated on Friday June 26th – Please scroll down for the update.

As Murphy’s law would have it, just days after we’ve launched our first commercial offering we’ve suffered a complete network outage for 12 minutes. This happened about 10 minutes ago. I’m currently working with our network provider Netriver to find out exactly what happened and to prevent it occurring in future.

For most web companies this would not have a significant impact. But because we provide real-time stats, there is currently a hole in your graphs for the last 60 minutes that lasts about 12 minutes.

This outage did not affect the ability of our customers websites to load. It simply means that your stats were not logged for 12 minutes.

Our sincerest appologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

Mark.

Update:

Netriver has been working with Cisco to resolve this issue. What happened is that Netriver has multiple redundant connections to the Net and has two redundant routers that route their traffic. In a rather unusual incident, both routers went down simultaneously. Here is the incident log:

Network Event times are approximate:
·         6:15 one of our core routers rebooted.
·         6:18 the router was back online.
·         6:25 we discovered the other core router was hung with a memory issue.
·         6:30 – 6:40 Tried to correct the memory issue unsuccessfully. We then made the decision to copy off the logging on the router and reboot.
·         6:43 rebooted router.
·         6:48 router was back online.

Netriver has multiple tickets open with Cisco to try and resolve the issue and Cisco have already responded with a diagnosis. Netriver is implementing Cisco’s recommendations to prevent this happening in future.

Feedjit, Netriver and Netriver’s upstream providers run redundant systems at every level from the application to infrastructure. This incident is highly unusual and the impact was minimal thanks to the quick reactions of the Netriver team. Both Feedjit and Netriver are taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again in future. Once again we apologize if the 12 minutes of down-time caused you any inconvenience.

Mark Maunder – Feedjit Founder & CEO.