Bloglet is a neat little XML-RPC service that parses RSS feeds and sends them via e-mail to subscribers. (If that sentence doesn’t make any sense to you, read below.) But in the past month it appears to have choked – the website is dead (I tried repeatedly to connect to it last night and this morning) and the weblog of Bloglet’s creator, Monsur Hossain, hasn’t been updated in almost a month (after near-daily updates for more than a year).
A bit more detail: many weblogs publish an XML version of their blog (you can see my “feed” here). This is primarily for XML readers (known as aggregators) – programs that periodically check the XML file for new content. If they see new content, they download it to the user’s PC so they can see what’s new at various weblogs and websites. Bloglet offered you a different option. Monsur recognized that many weblog readers don’t own an aggregator – and could instead “subscribe” to a weblog by simply providing their e-mail address. Bloglet would then check the weblog’s RSS feed on their behalf, and when new content was found it would e-mail what it found to the subscribers.
I set this service up on my blog focused on the Dean campaign, and had 30 or so people sign up in the first couple months. But updates appear to have stopped sometime around the beginning of the month – and now I can’t find any information about whether it died completely. From Google’s cache comes this post from mid-April:
Bloglet emails have been experiencing some problems as of late. I apologize to those of you who aren’t receiving updates right now.
Upon initial inspection, it looks like Bloglet just has too many sites to process in a day! I built Bloglet with scalability in mind, but XML-RPC calls to remote servers is an inherently slow operation, and it looks like Bloglet is outgrowing its implementation. I’m going to investigate some solutions over the weekend, and hopefully I’ll have more information (as well as a fix!) for you on Monday. Thanks for your patience!
In other news, Bloglet will also be moving to a new, more powerful server on Monday.
If anyone has any info about this, I’d love to hear from you.
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