Postgenomic hiatus

A couple of weeks ago I switched off the Postgenomic aggregation pipeline.

This is mainly because the pipeline scripts were hogging disk / memory resources on the server which it shares with a bunch of other applications. I'm not sure exactly where the process is sticking; but to be honest it's not a complete surprise.

Writing a blog aggregator is actually pretty easy; the hard part is dealing with all the weird edge cases. I haven't been paying close attention to the Postgenomic pipeline recently; I think what's currently going wrong is a combination of slow queries across what's now a very large database and one or more odd posts or blogs clogging up the pipeline (I'd post more details if I had them).

NPG doesn't officially support Postgenomic any more, though it does host it ably. Patching the code is something I do 'on the side', which is why it hasn't been fixed yet - I'm really pushed for time with other projects that need to take priority and will be for at least another three or four weeks.

In the meantime, no new blogs will be picked up and posts won't be aggregated at postgenomic.com. The site itself and the API will continue to work.

If you use postgenomic.com for any mashups or scripts then I apologise for the outage - sorry! It will be fixed, it's just the timing that's an issue.

In the meantime, please consider switching to Nature.com Blogs - the user facing features aren't as complete but the backend is. What's more it's fully supported by NPG developers and IT staff.