If yesterday I was anticipating some changes to coRank, this morning I woke up to a total dismay when I noticed that going to www.corank.com brought me to some TiVO community site.

What happened is that, as part of this coming update, we had to change the nameservers for coRank, and the person who did it made a terrible mistake. For those of you who don't know, a nameserver is the machine that holds the information that translates URLs (such as www.corank.com) into numeric IPs (such as 72.9.152.120).

And the terrible mistake was that the person who configured the new nameserver, by mistake entered a different IP (just one number difference, but that's enough), so what happens now is that when you enter www.corank.com in your browser, the nameserver is telling your browser to go somewhere else to retrieve the page.

Of course, the moment I noticed I called the person who manages the nameservers and he has already put the correct IP but unfortunately, nameservers work in a way that it takes time for any change to propagate to other nameservers, so depending on how lucky you are, you will be able to access coRank sooner or later.

What can I say - I've been managing Internet services for over 8 years, and I've pretty much gone through almost every possible situation. Yet, this is the very first time that I see one of my services pointing to someone else's web page.

In the meantime, if you want to access coRank but are still getting that TiVO page, you can access the real coRank by entering the IP "72.9.152.120" in your browser, instead of the www.corank.com domain name. This is of course just a very temporary solution. I expect that in a few hour evrything should be back to normal.

And by the way, this was certainly not one of the small bumps I was referring yesterday. Oh well...

It's been a few quiet weeks after the initial revolt we had after the launch. Well, last week we actually moved the coRank servers to a new datacenter and the move was as smooth as it could be. Phew!!

But although things have been quiet in the outside, I've been working non-stop "in the inside", and now it's time to start bringing those things out.

So in the next few days, as all the new stuff is being deployed in the live servers, things may get a bit bumpy as you use the site. Of course, ideally you won't notice a thing, but still, chances are you might, if you just happen to access the site right at the moment we're doing the update or even moments after that. Our updates are usually very smooth, but this one comes with lots of internal changes (boring stuff like architectural changes, file system restructuring, database changes, etc) and some of these updates are impossible to deploy without taking the site down, even if for just a few seconds.

Now, as all this new stuff gets implemented in the production servers, you won't see any of the new features...yet! The idea is to get all the updates in place before bringing them all live. Hopefully in a few days, they'll pop up and I will definitely announce it here.

So yes, things are about to get interesting again!