Mister Linky’s Blog

A new link repository has been added to the system, which should deliver links much faster, and give us much better overall system performance. The system has always stored all incoming links in a database, and will continue to do so. However, we will also cache the links, so that the database doesn’t have to be queried each and every time someone loads a page. What this means is that after a link is left on your site, it might take up to a minute for that link to appear when someone else comes to your site. This fine-tuning of this system will take some time to get just right, so please bear with us during this transition.

Again, my apologies for the instability of the system over the past week or so. Part of this was because of a hardware issue that, once resolved, took some additional fixing on the part of technical support at our hosting service. But the overall performance should improve noticeably — now, and especially after the transition to caching has been completed, a few days from now.

Please follow Mister Linky on Twitter for (hopefully) timely updates, and report any issues at the Help Desk.

Our hosting service is working a hardware issue.  I’ll let you know once they update me.

Note, for current status for this and other issues, you can follow @misterlinky on twitter.com.

If you have absolutely no idea what a ping is, you can probably just ignore this post.

On the other hand, if you’ve set up pinging from your blog to Mister Linky’s ping service, you might need to read this.

And if you’re here because Mister Linky sent you a pointer to this post… well in that case, please do keep reading.

We’ve set up a ping service so that ever-linky and comment-linky widgets can be automatically activated with whatever meme they are set up for. This is done by matching meme names with post titles — not terribly scientific, but pretty effective in most cases, since a lot of times people will title their post with the name of the meme in it, like “Wordless Wednesday #42″ or “Wordless Wednesday, The Grand Canyon” — the kind of thing.

If you are NOT using the ever-linky or comment-linky widget, there’s really no reason to set up your blog to ping Mister Linky. It won’t really do any harm, but it’s definitely not doing any good. In fact, it does cause your blog posts to take longer in processing, so there’s a reason to use it only when it’s needed — for the EL’s and the CL’s.

So if you’ve received this link and you’re not using ever-linkies or comment-linkies, you can go ahead and remove the blenza.com entry from your blog’s ping list. Thanks!

Here’s the tiniest bit of information I’ve got about using Mister Linky with Ning…

it appears that you can put a linky on a ning page using the header and linky code together like this:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.blenza.com/linkies/header.js”></script><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.blenza.com/linkies/autolink.php?owner=misterlinky&postid=02Jul2008″></script>

but javascript doesn’t appear to be allowed in a blog post on ning

Anyone with additional info on the subject is welcome to share!

the downtime we’re experiencing right now will be a good thing — finally moving to a VPS server that will handle our needs much better. hoping to get us back up asap!

I apologize for the abruptness of the move. I wish I could have given some warning, but our web hosting wanted us off of the old server and onto the new one, and we didn’t get much of a choice.

UPDATE: NS Records were created and the nameservers reset around 10:45 p.m. eastern. I don’t expect to get much sleep.

UPDATE: Nameserver propagation has reached a number of users, I can see. If you’re not able to reach blenza.com right now, it shouldn’t be too much longer.

UPDATE: I have registered blenza2.com, which might actually propagate faster, so if you need to get into your account, try this link: http://www.blenza2.com/linkies/ and that might help.

Looking for the Easy-Linky Widget in the wizard? Long story, but for now please use this wizard instead to get the Easy-Linky Widget.

Ignore all that, the easy-linky is back!!

I’ve been meaning to write this up for some time. Sometimes your linky widget won’t look quite right. It’s just the way things are sometimes when you’ve got style in your template. And one of these days I’ll get around to fixing that. But in the mean time, you still want it to look right! So here’s what you do, and of course, if you have a test blog to play with, that makes things easier, but if you have to do this in your live blog, SAVE A BACKUP OF YOUR TEMPLATE before you go making these changes.

In your <head> section (which might have “profile=blah-blah” in it, but hopefully you know what I mean)… you’ll want to put this code, that I’m going to highlight in red, alongside what should already be there, in gray. I’m setting the link font to 10 point Tahoma, as an example.

<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://blenza.com/linkies/header.js"></script>

<!-- begin style for mister linky -->
<style type="text/css">
.blenza-td {
  font-family: Tahoma;
  font-size: 10pt;
}
</style>
<!-- end style for mister linky -->

If you want a different color (green, for example), you’ll add something like this:

<!-- begin style for mister linky -->
<style type="text/css">
.blenza-td {
  font-family: Tahoma;
  font-size: 10pt;
  color: #00f;
}
.blenza-td a {
  color: #00f;
}
</style>
<!-- end style for mister linky -->

Sometimes the way your template has styles defined, the links won’t be the right color until you add a little extra magic — sometimes you have to do something like this:

#content .blenza-td a {
  color: #00f;
}

…but it’s not always “#content” so if you run into trouble, don’t hesitate to submit a help desk ticket and I’ll walk you through the details.

UPDATE

To make your widget a little narrower, use this kind of code:

<style type="text/css">
.blenza-box {
width:400px;
}
</style>

There appears to be some kind of hosting issue that is causing an outage.  I’ve filed an emergency ticket with them and will update you all when I find out what’s going on.  Thank you for your patience!

Clarification: if you see something about an account being suspended, it’s not YOUR account that’s suspended, it’s Mister Linky’s hosting account. Uggh!

UPDATE: It happened again, and for the last time, the server got moved. This caused two problems. 1) Any update that took place since some time last week didn’t get moved; 2) Users’ browsers may still be looking at the old server, not the new one. And 3) for a while on the old server there were “account suspended” messages and login prompts.

I sincerely apologize for this unexpected downtime, and have extended by ONE MONTH every single upgraded membership in the system.

If you’ve been to the widget wizard today, you maybe have noticed something new. It’s the EASY-LINKY! It’s just like the auto-linky but doesn’t require any changes to your blog’s header or other template files. Just drop the code into your post and you’re done. In a word, it’s EASY!

What’s different about the easy-linky, on the technical side, is the magic that the header code does provide now has to be part of every widget. Because that makes the easy-linky quite a bit more resource-intensive, you’ll need to be a gold member to use it.

But wait, there’s more! UPDATE — Yes, more!! A brand new Gold member benefit, long awaited, has finally arrived! It’s toolbar support! Just run the widget wizard and choose the auto-linky or easy-linky widget, and then after the widget wizard shows you your code, it will offer you a bookmarklet — just drag it to your toolbar and you’ll never (or hardly ever) have to visit the widget wizard again! You’re welcome! :)

A few people have asked me this, so I’d better write it up here. One of these days you’ll be able to get just two columns (or one) through the widget wizard, but that day, unfortunately, isn’t today.

You can get two columns instead of three if you add “&columns=2″ to the end of your script url

So instead of…

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.blenza.com/linkies/autolink.php&owner=yournamehere&postid=23Sep2008"></script>

…it would look like…

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.blenza.com/linkies/autolink.php&owner=yournamehere&postid=23Sep2008&columns=2"></script>

Be careful cutting/pasting from this blog — if you want to switch to two-columns, just copy this…

&columns=2

…and paste it into the right spot in your post, rather than copying the whole script tag from here — sometimes it gets messed up when people do that.