While I was in tweaking performance in the BUMPzee widget, I made a few simple changes…

First, you may have noticed that your own avatar picture appears in the recent visitors. Originally I designed it to not show the blog owner in the visitors. I’m not sure why. I think I noticed that MBL wasn’t showing it. I say why not?

If this bugs you and you want it the old way, please speak up.

Second, Stephen Cronin posted today about using iframes to speed up slow widgets (guilty), including his own implementation of a wordpress plugin to wrap iframes around widgets. There was a problem with the BZ widget in that clicks were staying inside the widget. So I added target=”_top” to the links in the widget so that it would open links in the main window, not in an iframe. I can’t imagine any bad effects from this, but if you see any, again let me know.

What a rough stretch it has been for the past several days.

Starting mid-last week we were seeing major performance issues on BUMPzee. The database slowed to a crawl and queries that were previously taking fractions of a second to execute were taking tens of seconds. With the constant data updates that happen on BZ, frequent deadlocks were occurring, sending the server spiraling down into sometimes complete unresponsiveness.

We tried everything we could to optimize queries, tables, data, indexes, stripped out some heavy queries, and more. Nothing would work.

Several times, we had to take BUMPzee into maintenance mode so we could do some major database operations. And a few times, I disabled the widgets so they wouldn’t cause your websites to slow down while they loaded.

To make matters even more stressful, I was a groomsman in a wedding this weekend. I was checking on the server and cleaning up the deadlock from my iPhone when necessary. (Don’t tell the bride!)

Once it started to look like the problems were deeper than the data. We upgraded the database, restarted servers and services. Something, or some combinations of things did the trick. Now finally, things are looking back to normal. Unfortunately, I changed so much that I won’t ever know what the root cause of the problems were. On the bright side, as I write this, things are looking faster than ever thanks to all of the database optimization and tuning we did.

I sincerely apologize for the slowdowns you were experiencing here and on your blogs due to the widgets. I hope that we’re out of the woods on this one.

In case you noticed an improvement to performance on BUMPzee today, it’s not your imagination.

We know that things were getting pretty bogged down around here and something that we’ve been working on for a while now is some hardware upgrades. Those were completed and transitioned this morning, so the BUMPzee site and widgets should be a little snappier.

We’re working on further performance improvements and will implement those as soon as we can.

The following enhancement will be appearing in the next few hours on BZ…

As BUMPzee has grown in the past few months, the increasing set of features has caused some fragmention in functionality. The biggest issues have formed between “zees” and the discussions that happen on blog entries. We’ve recently converted zees into full-blown discussions and we’re excited that they’ve become quite active. This, however, has distracted and detracted from the blog entries and the comments that happen on those. There are just too many places to track the conversations.

So, in an effort to simplify this, we have combined the two. Now, when you post a new discussion, it is created as a new entry, just like the blog entries. So now, the core element is again ‘entries’, whether it is created from a blog post or from a local entry. They all appear together in the same lists, so the attention and discussion should be much more focused.

We’ve migrated all existing zees to entries and comments and removed the separate “zees” tab in the communities. Now all conversations can be tracked in the “discussions” tabs.

Discussions still happen in the context of communities. Non-community topics happen in the “BUMPzee” community.

Check out the top level “Discussions” page for a global view of all the discussion activity on BUMPzee. You can filter the list to see just what interests you.

Or, keep a close eye on one community by viewing a community’s discussions tab.

Local entries will have the picture of the member to the left. Blog entries are a different color and have a blog screenshot.

There will undoubtedly be some initial chaos from this significant change, but I hope that once things settle down and you feel your way around this will be much easier.

Please feel free to provide feedback and ask questions. I’ll start up a discussion on BUMPzee and keep track of comments on this blog post.

Just a quick note to highlight some recent development we’ve been doing. BUMPzee got its start as a community platform and quickly grew into a place to get your blog listed, regardless of whether it fits into a community.

We’ve recently focused our energy on improving visibility to all blogs and launched some redesigned pages today.

The blog profile pages are now packed with info, such as recent viewers, recent blog posts, and if you have a widget installed (for tracking), we’ll show your most popular pages as well.

Also, for the blog owner, you can see some great stats on your blog visits as well as recent hits on individual pages.

But as one of the best parts about BUMPzee is just finding new blogs and new bloggers. We’ve reorganized the navigation to help you find plenty of new stuff to check out. I’m having a blast with the “New to You” page, under the Blogs menu (see picture below.) Go to that page to see a random list of blogs that you haven’t visited before. Go check them out.

Or sart on the BUMPzee homepage to see all sorts of brand new stuff.