The Official Eponym Blog

Eponym Blog Directory

Greg — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 16:48:16 -0500

We're getting close to launching our next big project, the Eponym Blog Directory, but first we need your help! What blogs are you reading? What blogs do you go to for research, for political commentary, or just for a good laugh?
We want to fill our directory with your favorite blogs.

Click here to submit a site.

25,000!

Dustin — Fri, 12 May 2006 14:01:06 -0500

We rolled past 25,000 blogs today. That's correct, I said 25,000! It's no surprise why things have quickly become so busy around here.

The future is looking bright here at Eponym as I share a sense of excitement with every single person on the Eponym team and all of our bloggers.

We want to extend a huge thanks to all of our faithful bloggers out there using Eponym. We appreciate all your hard work and effort to make Eponym a revolution in blogging.

We look forward to sharing our experience with you all as we continue to grow into the future!

DDOS Attack

Greg — Thu, 04 May 2006 00:17:12 -0500

Beginning at approximately noon EST Wednesday, May 3rd our network has been under a sever DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attack whose impact has been amplified by the attack's use of recursive name servers.

The extent of the DDOS attack was enough to knock out two of the three upstream providers to our co-location facility. Because of this, for the first four and a half hours of the attack, it was assumed by all involved that this was a network outage. It was only when the upstream providers were able to recover from the initial blow that we were able to determine that it was infact a DDOS attack.

The attack, while apparently directed at a single website not owned by or affiliated with Eponym, had an impact beyond its target making large portions of our network inaccessible for periods of time throughout the day. Since the site under attack is not associated with Eponym, our options for resolving without impact have been limited. The operations staff, along with those of both our co-location provider and their upstream providers have been working diligently to return service to normal.

The operations staff will be working through the night to make this situation as painless as possible. I am very sorry and I apologize for the issues that this has caused. We will continue to do everything in our power to make this better.

Bandwidth Limiting

Greg — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 15:11:22 -0500

Some of you might have noticed that we have been very lenient on the enforcement of monthly bandwidth limits. This has been mainly due to us not having the system fully ready to handle it. Well, we now have the system to handle it.

We have decided to allow everyone an extra month grace period before we start enforcing monthly bandwidth limits on May 1. We will post a full press release in the news section of our Help Blog next week that will describe in full how the bandwidth limiting will work. Also, we will be providing "bandwidth-only" and "automatic" bandwidth upgrades for our upgraded accounts to accommodate those of you who only need extra bandwidth.

10,000!

Greg — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 13:51:43 -0500

Yep, that's right. At 1:49pm CST we hit 10,000 blogs! We're not really sure how to celebrate around here, but we'll think of something.

Thanks to everyone out there for using our service. I hope we continue to earn your trust and support as we continue to grow.

THANK YOU!

This Past Month

Greg — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 15:33:59 -0500

This last month has really been fun for us. Besides some small modifications to our upgrade system, we've been planning out our next few stages of development. In the future I'll post a lot more about it, but for right now just know that we're working to greatly improve our search engine, we're developing a pretty unique directory system, and we've started designing the initial stages of an ad service.

We've also added a great graphic designer/art director to focus on our branding. His name is John Lein and he's already made a big impact on things around here. Be looking for a new design on a lot of our stuff in the coming month - of course, it will be hard to miss.

I looked back at one of my early posts a couple of months ago and I saw where we had just over 425 users. Well, here we are two months later, and we're adding almost 500 blogs a day and are just over 9,000 total blogs. The growth has been well beyond our expectations.

Upgrades!!!!!

Greg — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 13:37:31 -0600

Whew! Yes, we are finally finished. After intensive development and testing, I am pleased to announce that our blog upgrades are here!

First, the sales pitch...well, hopefully it doesn't need one. We just want to make sure you know what you can get when you upgrade your blog. Many people will be just fine with our free blogs which include 10MB of disk space, 100MB of monthly bandwidth, and our Eponym.com branding. They can figure out any issues they have on their own and don't want to add any extra web addresses.

So, you ask us, "Why should I upgrade my blog?" and we answer with, "This is why...". You get:

increased disk space
increased monthly bandwidth
email support
custom web addresses
remove Eponym branding (including ads!)

And just to clarify the last two points, custom web addresses will allow you to have up to three total URLs (web addresses) pointing to your blog. For example, besides this blog's normal address of 'official.eponym.com', we could also add 'officialblog.eponym.com' and 'www.theofficialeponymblog.com' (providing we actually already owned 'theofficialeponymblog.com') to our system and anyone going to these addresses would also see this blog. The last point, removing the Eponym branding, will allow you to remove the three required free blog components. These are the Eponym Toolbar (at the top of your blog), the Eponym "Start Blogging" ad, and the general Eponym ad block.

We'll end this post with a couple of thoughts on programming the upgrade system. The development took a little longer than planned (which is always the case, right???) mainly because of the unknown of tying four different systems together: our web server, recurring billing system, payment gateway, and blog system. The crazy thing is, if you consider all the work that went into it, the majority of it just comes down to processing one form. Yeah, I guess the recurring billing system, which runs at the beginning of every month, took some time to setup as well. But that still depended immensely on the form. In theory, I guess the simpler we make it for users, the more complex it will probably be behind the scenes. And that's ok - I love a challenge. So, cheers to the single, lone upgrade form.

Handling Support Issues

Greg — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 12:38:24 -0600

First of all, I apologize for the delay in updates over the past few weeks. Needless to say, this upgrade system has really taken over all of my time. But I'll leave that subject for another post.

And one quick note before I get into this post's main topic. I won't be answering support questions on this blog anymore, so for those of you that have been asking support questions on this blog, please read this post! It describes the proper channels for getting support now that we have a much better system in place.

Today I'd like to share with you a little bit of what we're doing here regarding eponym.com support.

To lay a foundation, our support policy is that we provide email support for upgraded blogs, which, more importantly to you, means that we do not provide support for free blogs. I hope you understand the obvious reason for this policy: since a large majority of our blogs are free, we would be unable to provide the resources needed to properly give support for all of our free blogs. In other words, the cost would be such that we wouldn't be able to provide free blogs anymore, thus eliminating the need (and the resources) to provide support for free blogs in the first place (pretty circular isn't it?). Well, bottom line, we don't want to stop providing free blogs.

With that being said, we've really been working on getting as much information as possible up on our Help Blog. We've got a User Manual and a Getting Started guide and are about to add an FAQ and a Tips & Tricks section. We're also planning on adding a user forum in the coming months so that you will be able to help each other (and I'm sure we'll drop by every now and then to help out as well).

There are a few other support issues that we run into from time to time that need to be addressed. That is why today we put up a Support Form. This form is for letting us know about technical issues that you are experiencing with our blog software, billing or account issues such as login problems or inquiries into suspended accounts, general feedback on our eponym.com system, and reporting abuse or Terms of Service violations. And for upgraded blogs, this is the form to use for any of your regular support questions.

We know how frustrating things can be when you can't get the answers that you are looking for, so we will continue to work on our help system to make it as comprehensive as possible.

Top Blogs! and News Lists

Greg — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 12:46:34 -0600

While I've been working on our upgrade system non-stop the last few weeks, I've also taken some time in the evenings (thanks to the graciousness of my wife) to work on a few more community based features.

I just finished the "Top Blogs!" feature (displayed on most of our main website pages) that shows a list of some of our most popular blogs. The listing is based off of HTML page views during the month and it resets at the beginning of every month. The reason I'm having it reset at the beginning of the month is because I want to show a little more of the trend in popularity than long-term popularity and it gives everyone a much better chance of making the list. I imagine that the list will vary greatly every day at the beginning of the month and then start to stablize towards the middle of the month with the long-term popular blogs rising to the top. It's just a guess, so we'll see what happens.

Along with the "Top Blogs!" feature, I also added a News tab that contains short summaries of our Help Blog's news items. It's a place to quickly get information on what's going on in the eponym.com community.

We've (finally!) had some pretty good snow here so it looks like I'm stuck inside for the weekend. This will give me a chance to finish up our upgrade system. We'll be testing it early next week and it should go live by the end of the week, so be looking for it!

Getting Started Guide and Spanish language User Manual

Greg — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 21:25:16 -0600

There's now a Getting Started guide up on the Eponym Help Blog. The Getting Started guide is mainly to help beginners make their initial posts to the Eponym system. Our goal is to make sure beginners are comfortable with the basics of Eponym as quickly as possible.

We've also added a Spanish language User Manual in PDF format. You can download it from the sidebar of any page on the Help Blog.

Eponym Help Blog

Greg — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 12:50:34 -0600

We've just put our Eponym Help Blog online!

Currently, it contains our User Manual and an Eponym News section. The User Manual fully describes every feature of our blog software. This is your ultimate reference to the Eponym.com Blog Control Panel. The Eponym News section will keep you up to date on all the events, upgrades, and scheduled maintenance outages at Eponym.com.

For the future, we are working on a "Getting Started" guide, an "Advanced Template Customization" guide, and an F.A.Q.

The Eponym Help Blog is your ultimate reference and support tool for Eponym.com.

Office Buzz

Greg — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 13:48:48 -0600

There's been a pretty big buzz going around the office this week. We launched this thing just over a week ago and have over 425 users with minimal advertising. I can't wait to see what happens to it as our advertising is expanded and users experience the difference of our service compared to the other popular blog services out there.

Yesterday, Alexa had us ranked a little over 10,000. I know that Alexa rankings can be manipulated and they aren't very consistent for new sites (it's down around 18,000 today), but it's still exciting to already be that high after just a week. We'll have a better idea of how we're doing after about a month. There's a big potential for us to succeed because of the people we have here, what we're doing and how differently we're doing it. We just have to work hard and bring together things that motivate, encourage and enrich the lives of our users.

A big thanks to all you early adopters of our service.

Blog Upgrades

Greg — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:09:34 -0600

We're now working on our blog upgrade system. This system will allow users to upgrade their disk space and monthly bandwidth allocation for a small fee (it helps us pay the bills!). It gets pretty complex because of the different servers that we have to hit, the security that is necessary, and the recurring billing portion of it. However, it should be coming soon so expect in within a few weeks.

The blog upgrades will allow users to increase their disk space and monthly bandwidth. Free blogs get 10MB of disk space and 100 MB of bandwidth / month, which is great for a free offering. However, good bloggers could hit those limits, so we want to offer packages that will accommodate the larger blogs.

In doing this, we want to continue to provide the best blogging software and service on the Internet and help you make a self for your name.

Captcha Added to Signup

Greg — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 12:26:13 -0600

We've just added a captcha to the blog sign up process. It's unfortunate that we have to add security checks like this, but this will cut out any attempts at automated sign ups.

We did a lot of research on captcha before adding it to the sign up process. There are so many weak and/or unreadable captchas out there. We wanted to make sure that we had one that was strong yet still easy to read. I think the one we finally went with accomplishes both things. Every now and then I'll see one where it is somewhat difficult to distinguish a few of the characters, but you can just click on the captcha itself to get a new one that is, hopefully, more readable.

Many thanks to the OCR Research Team for their insight into weak vs. strong captchas and their own implementation of captcha, tEABAG_3D, that we ended up going with.