Melanie Baker's dashboard

Thanks for the heads up. This may relate to another issue we're working on. Will let you know once we sort things out.

Two potentials reasons for that I can think of off the top of my head: 1) there was a glitch with Amazon that we dealt with this morning, so things might be backed up briefly, and b) comment checking frequency is based on number of subscribers, so may be a bit longer intervals. – Melanie Baker, on October 05, 2009 16:46

Hi Mario -- shouldn't be a problem. We use Disqus on our own blog. :)

Thanks for the additional info, Lee. Stuff like that will certainly help us to sketch out the best way to catalyze new engagement checking, how it'd work, etc. – Melanie Baker, on October 02, 2009 19:21

Answered via email, copied here for reference.

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Hi Lee,

The short answer to that is because we stop checking for metrics after a period of time (about a month). That's based on research on the "engagement curve" and determining when most posts get engagement, how soon, and how long it lasts, etc. With the way the system currently works, there's a sort of engagement expiration. Checking indefinitely requires a lot more resources.

That said, the conversation has been had a few times, and we have a backlog item to hash out a couple of ways we might implement this in the future. The first is automatic -- detecting new engagement when we check the feed, and kickstarting checking of older posts again if we see they have new engagement. Basically the post's life cycle would start over again. The second is more manual, enabling the author to manually reschedule engagement checks if they notice they've received new engagement or their numbers don't match with our system (because additional engagement has come in). The second option would be done in conjunction with blog claiming, giving blog owners a bit more control of the handling of their feeds in our system.

However, as noted, it's a backlog item, so we have no specific plans to do it (or how we'd do it) just yet. The main reason we built the system the way we did is that posts that get engagement long after they're published are rare in the grand scope of things. We've researched posts' lifecycle extensively, and the engagement curve is pretty consistent across all kinds of blogs. Of course, there's always the challenge of how to best manage the edge cases (balancing investment and ROI for both us and the users).

Hope that helps explain things. Not terribly satisfying, I'm sure, but that's how things currently work.

Melanie

Actually we're working on some UI tweaks right now. The login/logout process is definitely going to be a big part of that. :) (Especially the part where that button disappears when you're logged in, currently...)

Hi Seth,

Okay, so this is partially fixed. Posts from Sept. 24th and later will show correctly, and we have a task on our backlog to fix the archive of posts prior to that date. I will let you know when those should be showing correctly.

Hi Greg -- good timing! We just noticed that and have started investigating. :)

Will give you a holler once we get it sorted out.

Continuing investigation via email, so I'll close this off.

Addressing of the issue has moved to email for solving, so I'll close this off.

Hi Marcus -- We'd love to add Facebook data to our system, but they don't offer any APIs that would enable us to do so. (Believe me, we've asked!) Until that's publicly available, Facebook remains a walled garden to us and everyone else, I'm afraid.

I am not aware of a systemic login issue. Do you get the "Oops" page, or some random page with error messages?

Also, could you send me the URL of the blog associated with the account, or the email address you used to create the account? We can investigate better then. Either here or to melanie@postrank.com if you prefer.

Thanks for letting us know. Shouldn't be because it's too new. Could you send me the URL of the blog you're setting up the account for, or the email address you used for the account? If you prefer, you can email the details to me: melanie@postrank.com, and I'll get the guys to investigate.

Currently you can only track one blog per account. Multi-user/multi-blog functionality is something we're currently looking into, however.