After some finally tweaks, we managed to push another release today and finished migrating all users from the old alpha architecture. We were so excited, we decided it was time to send some more invites to some more users that have been waiting for it for ages! (We really regret that, sorry guys!).

Suddenly what we can only define as a shit storm came our way. Servers were on fire, even though we didn’t send too many invites. Problem is that our system scales with the number of feeds each users has. Some of our new alpha users are really feed junkies (you know who you are! ) and really pushed the total number of feeds the system manages really fast. We are throwing some stats so you get some idea:

As you can see, the number of feeds being tracked by Inkzee internally nearly triplicated in a 20 minute span. We are storing, displaying and sorting 32,859 posts right now and growing fast.

In the process of managing such a large amount of new feeds some parts of the backend went belly up. We are investigating it now and we hope we can fix them soon. Even though some things broke, they weren’t critical parts so the system recovered from the failures pretty fast which is good news.

The moment we stabilize the system again we’ll continue sending new invites. Right now we are also focusing in adding new features. The next one in our roadmap will be the ability of creating custom filters and keyword alerts. We hope to release that some time next week.

As usual, thanks a lot for your patient and keep coming, but gently

The Inkzee Team

Currently we have the bare basics and we are working hard to bring new features every couple of days. All the feedback is greatly appreciated and we hope we can have an open version in a couple of months or so.

So, if you are interested in participating in the alpha program or you are one crazy early adopter please feel free to request an invite at http://www.inkzee.com and we’ll send you an invite as soon as possible. Right now we are sending invites in small batches but we’ll eventually send you your invite.

You can also read more periodic updates on our Twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/abarrera.

Thank you all for your patient!!

Apart from that, we’ve managed to finally add the about us and contact sections on the main website. We’ve also enabled an invite request section on the main website so that interested users can request an invite to the private alpha program we are running.

We’ll start sending invites the moment we finish some interface details and all the tests are done. Hopefully that will be in a couple of days. Stay tuned!

Oh, and we’ve created a Twitter account where you can follow our day to day activity: http://twitter.com/inkzee

Today we migrated all the development databases to a live server and we installed and configured the system. We’ve been checking that the system is working as expected and that all functionalities are working as the should. Right now we want to leave the alpha running all night to see that nothing crashes and hopefully we’ll start sending invitations tomorrow.

We are very excited about this first version and we hope that in a couple of weeks we’ll be able to start the beta testing with more users. Stay tunned as we’ll post new updates soon.

Once again, thank you all for your patience!