We just performed our weekly rollout of changes to SocialSpark. You can see the full list by clicking on this link.
The notes for the latest release of SocialSpark can be found at the Izea Boards following this link.
There was an error in our last rollout of new code for SocialSpark that affected the ability for new users to create avatars.
A fix was released that corrected a problem where corrupted image uploads did not hang any following uploads for that user. This, however, stopped any new users (more specifically, any user that did not previously have an avatar) from being able to upload images.
After spending most of the night correcting and testing the issue, we have just deployed a fix for this. All new users should now be able to upload an image to use as their avatar.
We made another fix release of SocialSpark this morning. As always the notes on just what got addressed in the release are over in the launch history section of the Izea Boards.
Soon after we rolled out this fix, we were able to quickly identify a problem with it. We have undone the rollout and will be correcting the problem so we can roll it out again in the near future. I apologize for the inconvenience and just want to clarify that this fix did not roll out tonight as planned. I'll keep you all updated when we plan the next rollout.
Hey there postie peeps!
I just wanted to drop by and let you all know that we have received some tickets about the stats on your blogger dashboard being inaccurate. The problem caused the numbers for "Have Been Paid", "Will Be Paid", etc... on the blogger home page to get out of whack from time to time. Thankfully, this problem never did affect the actual figures in your payouts. We've been working on the fix for quite some time and we are finally ready to release it tonight. We'll have to bring the site down for about 10 minutes. This is going to happen at 10:00pm EST. If you have a reservation that expires around that time, you should try to get it in a few minutes early so you don't miss out!
We made a new release of SocialSpark yesterday addressing a number of bugs and concerns our users found recently.
The full release notes can be read at our boards, along with the notes for previous releases we have made.
Managing expectations and perception is probably the most intricate challenge when it comes to opening a site early to a private audience. That's exactly what we did with the Alpha phase of SocialSpark of course. I'm happy with the way the Alpha phase went in that it highlighted a number of areas that we needed to drastically up our game before launch. The downside of course is that old 'perception' chestnut.
The purpose of an Alpha test is to allow a small subset of the actual user base into an application to 'kick the tires'. It gives the dev team great feedback on everything from usability, to performance, to bugs and issues and that need to be fixed before release. We rapidly ramped up the number of invites issued as we neared the end of the Alpha phase as well and as a result got a pretty good view of what the site would be like under load at release time.
Performance was probably the biggest area that we had to address. SocialSpark is really something of a 'mashup' of a number of Izea developed technologies. It uses ITK and IzeaRanks for analytics reporting, RSSBrief for buzz tracking and blog summarization. We developed a financial hub for the application that will later be expanded to support all our apps. The 'ranker' system used by IzeaRanks to synchronize data across our databases and then calculate score and rank for blogs plays a large part in SocialSpark as well. The highly graphical nature of a beautiful site like SocialSpark coupled with a lot of back end interdependencies caused some slow downs that became very evident towards the end of the Alpha. The somewhat brittle nature of some of the connections between the systems also reared it's head on the final day of testing and even on the day of launch when our SocialSpark user base went through the roof.
We have nailed it now though. We learned a lot about scaling a high demand system with PayPerPost, and at times with that system found ourselves fighting a near constant fire of performance and scalability. SocialSpark was designed with the lessons we learned firmly in mind.
We reduced the size of the javascript files we are using by compressing them a few days ago. The CSs files that do all the exquisite layout work on the site are being split and simplified greatly, reducing their size as well. All static content on the site (css, javascripts, images) have been moved onto a content delivery system, exploiting the benefit a CDN gives us in terms of cacheing data but also serving it to you from a server physically near you (we only have the one data center, our CDN has thousands).
SocialSpark's user interface is also made of a bunch of smaller blocks called Components. We undertook some very serious work to work out how long each individual component on a page could be cached without detracting from the near real time functionality of the site. The result is that many components are now only built once per minute, dramatically reducing the load on our application servers. Brittle connections between systems were also reduced and in many cases eliminated, replaced with intricate scripts that are far more resilient to load and far more tolerant of failures.
On the backend, our systems guys did some amazing work building out a hardware architecture that is fault tolerant, fail-over ready and highly scalable. Today the site is running on hardware that gives it 100% growth capacity, and that's from day 1. We'll constantly monitor performance and load on the servers and bring on more hardware as we see growth to constantly maintain a nice comfortable buffer to grow into, rather than scrambling to catch up when load overtakes us and brings the site down.
All in all then, I feel SocialSpark is a great system and technical architecture. While we had some issues leading up to and immediately after launch, the site right now is up, fast, stable and scalable and hopefully providing you all with a fantastic user experience. If you find anything to the contrary though, please don't hesitate to let me know.
We have to do some maintenance on the PayPerPost database servers this morning that will involve us taking the site offline for approximately 15 minutes. This will take place at 8:30am Eastern.
Thanks for your patience.
We will shortly be taking down the PayPerPost Direct Directory to make some changes internally. This will not affect functionality of PPP Direct as a whole, and we expect the directory to be down only for about 2 hours.
Sorry for the short notice on this one.
