Continuing on from Bloggy Network: the series the first site I want to talk about is Blog Flux.

As I had explained in my previous post, Blog Flux arose from the ashes of EatonWeb. What it did differently compared to all other directories was that it eschewed the traditional hierarchal structure, instead opting for a free-flow category/tag structure. Choose upto 10 categories – it is not my position to tell you what your blog is (or isn’t) about. Initially we had allowed an unlimited number of categories, but due to abuse, it was chopped down to 10.

My original plan with Blog Flux was always to be more than just a blog directory – it was to be a clearing house of anything and everything related to blogs. Having to bounce through multiple sites for simplistic services seemed a bit cumbersome. Bloggers were forced to go to X site for a button maker. And then Y site to perform pings. And then Z to see their statistics. The entire process was extremely cumbersome – remembering multiple logins was a headache.

Not everything went perfectly. We had to retire two subsections – Subscriptions and LinkLog. Subscriptions we had launched just around the time FeedBlitz. was launching. While I think our solution was quite lightweight and simplistic, FeedBlitz was honestly just the better solution. The other one that went down was LinkLog, similar to the original function of MyBlogLog. We extended the system, tracking AdSense clicks, and adding in a lot more functionality. Unfortunately, this was something that collapsed under its weight due to issues with scaling. Dealing with 100,000 clicks a day is easy. Dealing with 1 million clicks a day becomes much more complicated!

While we originally launched services in a rapid manner, what has really slowed us down now are the beforementioned scaling issues. With the size of the operations now, we need to test each system under heavy stress. For example, the Who’s Online system took about a day to write. But what wasn’t so easy was scaling the entire options – it generates over a million pageviews a day. Handling that load with speed requires more finesse than programming 101.

Overall though, Blog Flux has been a huge success. The site is simplistic, and offers pretty much whatever you want under one roof – from statistics to easy tools to blog themes, it requires one login to utilize them all. And users love it and are more than happy to link back – we have 10 active subdomains, and two defunct (Subscription + LinkLog). Every single subdomain that has PageRank has a PR of 7. Google reports 217,000 backlinks, and Yahoo clocks in at 2.9 million backlinks. The site itself generates 1.25 million pageviews a month, but we serve up over 20 million apache requests per day!

There is more coming, The integration of Commentful should be ready next week. We are working on a local blogging system that should launch in 4-6 weeks (powered by iBegin Source. Within the year I expect us to hit 2.5 million pageviews a month.