3 ms·
HELLO! I recently signed up for your service, tested it out a bit, and really wanted to give you $20 for a year's plan, but was dissuaded by the fact that there
by ThaddeusQuay2 15y ago
HELLO! I recently signed up for your service, tested it out a bit, and really wanted to give you $20 for a year's plan, but was dissuaded by the fact that there are no blog entries since November 25th, and by the fact that indexing of PDFs, a feature request which was made about a year ago in one of your polls, is still not done. Can you tell me the status of the PDF indexing, and/or about the general maintenance and updates that are going on behind the scenes? I like your service a bit more than Pinboard, despite their additional features, and I would still like to commit to yours, in the form of a paying customer, but I first want to know that it hasn't been abandoned, or at least that it's not totally on autopilot. Thanks in advance for a detailed reply.
P.S. I really hate to point this out, but $30 per month does not inspire confidence. How do you handle backups, and switching over to another machine if the main one should fail (as well as other such items, which normally incur an extra cost in this kind of setup)?
- StavrosK 15y agoHello! The service hasn't been abandoned, but feature development has slowed down a bit, sadly, hence PDF indexing taking so long. Apart from that, though, everything is working perfectly, and we do change some small things from time to time or upgrade/maintain components. Downtime should be excellent, though, we've had minimal downtime for the past year. Right now, everything is served from a single server, which is why we get hit by some datacenter maintenance from time to time. Backups are made daily as well as multiple times a week, so that shouldn't be a concern... Let me know if you have any other questions!
- ThaddeusQuay2 15y agoI like your interface a bit better than Pinboard's, because yours is more like Google's. I like some other things about yours, although I don't recall them at the moment. However, I do remember that I was able to bookmark PDFs, even if they aren't searchable. So, I can at least add tags. I see that your Twitter is rather current, but it wouldn't hurt to do a monthly blog update, even something minor, because I assume that there are other people, than myself, who look at these details when it comes to deciding whether to commit to a service. Said commitment is really less about money, and more about the perceived reliability, stability, and long-term viability of the service. I suggest that, in the export function, you include everything about each bookmark, such as tags, dates, and whatnot, because it will likely make the customer feel better to know that they can get a complete snapshot of their efforts, whether they are leaving the service, or whether they are attempting to occasionally perform some external operation on their data. Giving customers complete ownership of their information is a good differentiator, because most websites don't provide such a thing. My last question: How do you handle (D)DOS attacks on public bookmarks? I can see this as being a potential problem. Thank you for providing an alternative to Pinboard!
- StavrosK 15y agoHmm, you have a good point about blog updates, it's just that we use Twitter for minor announcements. I'll have to change that, though. Export already includes all the data except the actual page text, so by downloading that file once in a while you can reconstruct your bookmarks almost perfectly (or just import it into your browser). There haven't been any DoS attacks yet, but varnish is a champ, so that would be pretty easy to mitigate, depending on the scale...