Amatomu is alive! Sheds its Alpha tag and goes Beta

Amatomu.com was the first South African blog ranking engine to hit the web and went from strength to strength under the guidance of Vincent Maher and Matthew Buckland. After the 2 of them left Mail & Guardian, Amatomu seemed to take a knock with the site taking longer and longer to load, users complaining of the tracking code slowing page load times and with little or no development happening on Amatomu, it was left for dead.

Last week however Amatomu shed it’s Alpha label and has announced a total restructure of how rankings and hits are being gathered. Along with that, the javascript tracking code has been updated to rather use a 1×1 pixel image based tracking system which seems to have made Amatomu’s stats more reliable.

From Amatomu.com – Goodbye Alpha, hello Beta!

We’ve been hard at work, rebuilding Amatomu from the ground up. You may have noticed in the past that Amatomu wasn’t the fastest site on the Internet, even with 60 minute cache times and a dedicated server.

So we’ve rebuilt it on CodeIgniter (which is what we use for mg.co.za), and spent sleepless nights pouring over every technical aspect of Amatomu. No Sql query went unoptimised. We’ve moved servers and Amatomu is now spread between Afrihost’s dedicated box and shared space with a new M&G virtual server sitting on IS architecture.

The performance differences are staggering. Before, we had to cache for up to an hour to keep Amatomu up at all. We’ve now dropped caching, and are serving live data. If you refresh your page you’ll see things change.

We also used to process the stats in batches. That meant you could only see stats that were at best three hours old, and some that were a day or more old. Now, all stats tracking is live. If you’re on your stats page, click refresh to watch your hit counters go up.

We’ve done a lot of work to ensure that the stats are more accurate than before. You’ll see a closer correlation between Amatomu and server-side stats.

We’re also much more aggressive at fetching your RSS feeds. We used to only be able to get to each feed once a day. Now, we’re fetching them all in just over an hour. That means you won’t have to sit around waiting for your post to pop up on Amatomu.

We’ve also given you the ability to tell Amatomu to go fetch your RSS feed, and we’ll tell you if we’re having a problem getting your feed.

There are a few other subtle improvements – you can retrieve lost passwords (finally), and we’ve changed the tagging system so that you can drill down to people or companies. Logging a hit is down to around 300ms – that means there’s very little speed impact on your blog. And we’ve officially changed from “Alpha” to “Beta” phase.

Along with some major under-the-hood changes, they also removed a number of blogs that did not abide by the terms & conditions set out by Amatomu.

Amatomu also is in need of a fresh coat of paint, but I’m sure most of us are happy to see progress and that M&G haven’t left one of the SA’s blogosphere’s most loved (at one point ) tools for dead.