Mike Chambers

code = joy

Update on MXNA (or what the %@#! is going on!)

with 51 comments

Well, as you probably know, MXNA (a feed aggregator for Adobe related communities and technologies) has had some stability issues for some time, and has recently been down for the past couple of days.

Update : MXNA is back up at its new url : http://feeds.adobe.com

I wanted to make a quick post giving an update on what is going on, and what we are doing to fix it.

First, what is going on?

Sometime last week, our Java JRE on weblogs.macromedia.com became corrupted, which prevented ColdFusion (7) from running. Updating the JRE did not fix this issue. This has resulted in MXNA being offline, as well as any weblogs running on the server that rely on ColdFusion (which is just about all of them).

At the same time, we have been in the process of updating and upgrading MXNA. This includes (but is not limited to) moving MXNA to new server cluster, updating the server to ColdFusion 8, and moving the aggregation engine to its own server. This should dramatically improve stability as well as improve performance. This process is going well, but still requires some work. We have been focusing our efforts on this in order to get MXNA live on the new infrastructure as soon as possible.

In the meantime, we are now looking at making some temporary updates to the weblogs server to try and get it back up until we have the new infrastructure set up. You might see it go up and down while we work on this, but we don’t have a definitive ETA on it other than soon.

Some quick background on MXNA. MXNA was a project that Christian Cantrell and I put together (Christian did almost all of the development) to provide a resource for following conversations around Macromedia (now Adobe) resources. It was launched almost exactly 5 years ago and originally focused on Flash and ColdFusion and aggregated around 50 weblogs. It was originally hosted on our own server (markme.com), and has since moved to a dedicated Adobe server (weblogs.macromedia) which was not part of the main Adobe cluster. Since then it has expanded way beyond its original scope, and now aggregates over 1800 weblogs across multiple communities and categories. The aggregation process itself takes nearly an hour.

Clearly MXNA has outgrown its original architecture and server. We are working on rectifying both of those issues.

I have uploaded opml files for all of the blogs in MXNA, in case you want to aggregate them yourselves until MXNA is back online. You can grab them from here.

I will update this weblog post whenever there is new information.

If you have any questions, comments, words of encouragement, or you just want to rant, post them below.

Written by mikechambers

April 29th, 2008 at 1:50 pm

Posted in General

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51 Responses to 'Update on MXNA (or what the %@#! is going on!)'

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  1. Hey Mesh,
    Just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work you and Christian have put into the MXNA. It’s a huge part of our community. Thanks again.

    Brandon Ellis

    29 Apr 08 at 2:00 pm

  2. Feed-Squirrel.com is still up and running if anyone’s missing MXNA….;)

    Neil Middleton

    29 Apr 08 at 2:02 pm

  3. Mike,

    Thanks for the update. It is good to know that you guys and Adobe see this as a project worthy of effort and expense.

    Yes, I have missed MXNA and have been Twittering about it for the past week or so. It blows my mind how much I have depended on MXNA to keep up-to-date on a daily basis. But I will patiently wait for you guys to “get ‘er done!”

    Thanks!

    Leif
    Atlanta

    Leif Wells

    29 Apr 08 at 2:11 pm

  4. Hi mike

    Arabic category needs to fix it’s text direction , and thank you for updates !! really i missed MXNA !!

    Saeed Ashour

    29 Apr 08 at 3:22 pm

  5. Yeah, Mesh. Thanks for the update.

    MXNA is a huge part of the Adobe community and we’re glad to see Adobe moving to improve it.

    Thanks for all the hard work!

    Tom Ortega

    29 Apr 08 at 3:25 pm

  6. Thats a bummer Mike. I went on vacation last week to get back only to find the blogs are down specifically mine. I’ll wait till you guys get this beast up and running again! I didnt realize how much I enjoyed the aggregator till I got back into action for a couple days and really really appreciate the work you guys put into it. But as of now I feel like THERE IS NO INTERNET! like in Overlogging via Southpark. :)

    http://www.southparkzone.com/episodes/1206/Over-Logging.html

    Alan Musselman

    29 Apr 08 at 4:40 pm

  7. @Mike

    are you (or anyone else you know – eg B.Forta) doing any traffic stats while MXNA is down? see how much effect it’s had, if at all?

    barry.b

    29 Apr 08 at 4:53 pm

  8. Hi Mike, need some help? Let me know, I’m only a VPN away ;-).

    On that thought maybe it would be possible to open it to the community to help resolve/enhance/etc.

    Best,

    Jeff

    Jeff Bouley

    29 Apr 08 at 4:55 pm

  9. Of course the original Fullasagoog is still available: http://www.fullasagoog.com/ :) The Goog is very *selective* — less is more, signal vs noise.

    Geoff Bowers

    29 Apr 08 at 5:17 pm

  10. [...] the time of writing, MXNA is still down. Mike Chambers of Adobe has put the OPML files up, though. I am trying to figure out if there’s a feed aggregator that works [...]

    josh >> /dev/blog & » Blog Archive » mxna is still down

    29 Apr 08 at 9:37 pm

  11. Check out http://www.planetflash.org

    Knut Urdalen

    29 Apr 08 at 11:10 pm

  12. Mike,

    I noticed the stability problems a while back and was never sure who I could report them to. I didn’t realise how much I used MXNA until it wasn’t there.

    I look forward to its return. Thanks for the great resource.

    Kevin Roche

    29 Apr 08 at 11:48 pm

  13. Glad you’ll finally get time and resources to fix it!

    I’ve also listed a few alternatives in this post:
    http://www.flashmagazine.com/News/detail/mxna_improvements/

    J

    Jensa

    29 Apr 08 at 11:55 pm

  14. thanks for the update, can’t wait for the improved mxna!

    Chris H

    30 Apr 08 at 12:06 am

  15. MXNA is my morning paper. I’m glad to hear it’s getting an upgrade – best of luck with it all ;)

    paddy

    30 Apr 08 at 12:21 am

  16. mike
    thanx for update i really miss mxna
    it’s my first thing I open on web

    KLadofoRA

    30 Apr 08 at 2:58 am

  17. Mike – Thanks for the update. It is great for the community that Adobe decided to upgrade MXNA and make improvements. Despite some opinions that most have moved away from MXNA, it is clear that some of us are waiting for this upgrade. Thanks again for the sticking with it and making it a beacon for ColdFusion once again.

    Jim Pickering
    Kansas City

    Jim Pickering

    30 Apr 08 at 4:43 am

  18. I’ve had such a busy couple weeks that I was actually glad that MXNA went down ;-) Fewer opportunities for me to procrastinate. But seriously, MXNA, while it worked, was great. I can’t wait to see what it’ll be like once more development hours pile onto it.

    -Dusty Jewett
    Seattle

    Dusty

    30 Apr 08 at 5:15 am

  19. The day is so boring without MXNA – i’ll hope that you can fix the problems in near feature – MXNA is a huge peace of inspiration -

    Boris – Hamburg

    Boris

    30 Apr 08 at 5:59 am

  20. I just dont understand why this core service to the community isn’t more actively supported by Adobe. Thorough, responsive, accessible, multi-lingual, robust, available, interactive, documentation and blog aggregation are the backbone of your development community. If you ask me, I’d recommend putting Developers Week and the Developer Center all on hold until these two fundamental anchors get done properly. Don’t make the community hack its own live docs and coldfusionbloggers etc., etc. It’s all just more noise when whats important is the content they relay. Personally I think Adobe itself should be playing this role. How great would it be to have confidence in ONE source for live docs and ONE feed for all CF blogs? Currently I have fullasagoog, feedsquirrel, coldfusionbloggers, etc – all of which are fine, but nevertheless 95% identical. OK but definitely kudos to Mike – just think it should all be taken more seriously. thanks

    Rich

    30 Apr 08 at 6:44 am

  21. Im boring without MXNA. What I’ll go to read now? ¿Google Tech News?

    Quantium

    30 Apr 08 at 7:15 am

  22. Glad to see MXNA is getting the love from Adobe it clearly deserves, and hope it’ll be up again soon (and stay that way :-) ).

    Tom Chiverton

    30 Apr 08 at 7:35 am

  23. Mike
    Thanks for the update
    I Realy Miss mxna
    and Webblog

    mohammed

    30 Apr 08 at 7:42 am

  24. thanks for the update, can’t wait for the improved mxna!

    haberler

    30 Apr 08 at 7:59 am

  25. thanx for update i really miss mxna

    son dakika

    30 Apr 08 at 7:59 am

  26. thanks man !

    videolar

    30 Apr 08 at 8:00 am

  27. Thanks Mike for the update. Take your time to make MXNA better and stable so there won’t be any more rants about “CF is crap” or whatever… . MXNA is important for the community so if you need a few days more, no worries.

    Patrick Tai

    30 Apr 08 at 8:08 am

  28. thanks for the hard work…and if everyone is complaining that mxna is down , its because there is lots of people using/loving it.
    Hope the issues are solved soon and thank you and C.Cantrell for such a great idea!

    Paulo Moreira

    30 Apr 08 at 9:44 am

  29. On that thought maybe it would be possible to open it to the community to help resolve/enhance/etc.

    subeler

    30 Apr 08 at 12:10 pm

  30. it’s important it WILL be back, just like Terminator ;)
    thanks for your team work!

    MrSteel

    30 Apr 08 at 12:35 pm

  31. You can do it!

    denstar

    30 Apr 08 at 3:52 pm

  32. Hurry!!! Hehe.

    Now I have nothing to do at work.

    Winrich

    30 Apr 08 at 5:49 pm

  33. Hi there My name is steve I was wondering if anyone in here can help me with something I have 20 videos that Run on Adobe Flash Player 9 and I wanted to record them but this is the thing its fully protected and I was wondering is there a way to get by that, So I can record those videos onto my DVD-R or not if anyone in here knows the answer to that I would really appreciate if someone can E-mail me at
    playersclub992001@yahoo.com or
    Megaman9968@yahoo.com
    Thank you very much

    Steve

    Steve

    30 Apr 08 at 7:22 pm

  34. [...] lately. Mike Chambers, one of the originators of the project, has posted an update to his blog on what is happening with MXNA. Looks like it will be back sometime [...]

    SitePoint Blogs » The Week in ColdFusion: 23-29 April: sharpen your skills

    1 May 08 at 8:19 am

  35. thanks

    izmir evden eve

    1 May 08 at 10:00 am

  36. Thanks for all the time and hard work you’ve put into this site. I’m looking forward to being able to start off my mornings with MXNA again. :)

    P.J. Onori

    1 May 08 at 10:04 am

  37. Hurry Up!!! :)

    Mathew

    1 May 08 at 11:32 pm

  38. I’m sure you guys have been there yourselves… you start something up as a grass roots or boot strap effort… maybe even a proof of concept, it gains traction and is all of a sudden production. But was never scoped to function in such a high capacity, and the time it takes to redo it… is hard to justify when the service is “surviving” and there are more immediate burning issues on your plate…

    It sounds like there were and are some serious plans for MXNA that were in play, but the project timeline anticipated the current service surviving long enough to achieve the next generation platform.

    I’m hanging in there Mike!

    Tariq Ahmed

    2 May 08 at 10:32 am

  39. I hope come back weblog macromedia

    minikperi

    2 May 08 at 10:50 am

  40. Just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work you and Christian have put into the MXNA. It’s a huge part of our community. Thanks again.
    http://www.photographic.gr

    Kostas Mpouris

    3 May 08 at 1:22 am

  41. When will open weblogs again.

    kraloyun

    3 May 08 at 3:24 am

  42. Big thanks for providing the news feed and good luck with the upgrade. :-)

    Gary Fenton

    3 May 08 at 12:09 pm

  43. Thank you for all these things you do for the community.
    Missing my MXNA :)

    Bazard

    4 May 08 at 5:44 pm

  44. Mike,
    congrats on launching adobe feeds.

    Just wanted to let you know that http://www.markme.com is not redirected to adobe feeds yet. It still displays the “Weblogs is Temporarily Offline” message.

    Cheers!

    Arul Prasad

    5 May 08 at 6:57 pm

  45. [...] Mike has been saying that MXNA is undergoing a revamp with prettier and faster servers with CF8 which can match the load that the site has come to demand. Update your RSS feeds and enjoy the new MXNA. So here’s presenting the new Adobe Feeds – http://feeds.adobe.com/ [...]

    MXN aka Adobe Feeds and other News! « FLEXing My Muscle

    5 May 08 at 7:42 pm

  46. Hi Mike,
    Thanks for the great job. It seems as you are doing a major revamp and I think thats better than doing temporary patches.
    Wish you all the best with your effort.

    Flash Developer

    5 May 08 at 8:00 pm

  47. Thanks for all the hard work!

    Bebek

    6 May 08 at 1:47 am

  48. sorry to sound like a complete mornon, but what does MNXA stand for?

    and how soon can i get access to the blogs?!

    Jane Carter

    6 May 08 at 4:43 am

  49. sorry to sound like a complete moron, but what does MNXA stand for? and how soon can i get access to the blogs?!

    Jane Carter

    6 May 08 at 4:43 am

  50. Thank you for all these things you do for the community.
    Missing my MXNA :)-

    ????

    9 Sep 08 at 3:03 am

  51. Thank you for all these things you do for the community.
    Missing my MXNA :)-

    Onur

    24 Jan 10 at 4:23 pm

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