Mark Fletcher, Bloglines & Blogworld

Mark Fletcher,who earlier wrote about his experience in starting Bloglines – one of the most notable success in the blogworld – real startup, garage mindset & launched with the philosophy to keep things simple but allow for scaleup is indeed a phenomenon in the blogosphere. His presentation on bloglines startup experience is a must read for all those interested in entrepreneurism and the evolution of the blogosphere. Mark and Bloglines are clrear trendsetters and consistent winners - even after Askjeeves acquisition,it is really an achievement of sorts to have retained the old look and feel and maintain the same user experience . Mark writes about his experience in moving bloglines infrastructure recently – aimed at moving the Bloglines service to the main Ask facility, as it would be easier for operations, it would be easier for to quickly expand in the future, and it would be easier to tie into other parts of Ask Jeeves.
Some peep into bloglines architecture : The Bloglines back-end consists of a number of logical databases. There's a database for user information, including what each user is subscribed to, what their password is, etc. There's also a database for feed information, containing things like the name of each feed, the description for each feed, etc. There are also several databases which track link and guid information along with the system that stores all the blog articles and related data. There are close to a trillion blog articles in the system, dating back to when we first went on-line in June, 2003. Even compressed, the blog articles consist of the largest chunk of data in the Bloglines system, by a large margin. It reckoned that during transfer the blog article data needed to be moved ahead of time, the other databases could be copied over in a reasonable amount of time, limiting our downtime to just a few hours. Blog articles are not stored using We traditional databases - a custom replication system based on flat files and smaller databases is employed as it works well and scales using cheap hardware. While big enterprises can afford to spend millions and millions to build, experiment and grow, what Bloglines has accomplished in large measure owing to Mark’s vision with limited budget but with better vision and neat execution, is really commendable. Bloglines is indeed a phenomenon.