Bouquets and brickbats. Accolades and bugs :-). Well, the past 7 weeks since we launched the service has been quite fascinating and it has been adrenaline heavy times for us all at Minekey. A big thank you to everyone for helping make Minekey better every single day.

Thanks to Vivek @ Startup Squad for such a nice note. Yes – we have fixed the Recommendations Latency Issue. Vivek in nice note states:

“Minekey, the content recommendation service delivered via a widget that I had written about couple of times earlier, is now performing way better - actually, perfectly. Earlier, the widget had issues resolving FeedBurner URLS, which has now been fixed according to the Minekey team. Now the recommendations are working as they were expected to in the first place - take in consideration your browsing tastes and history to recommend relevant articles from select feeds. Each new page view now results in 5 new content recommendations (of course it still depends on how big of an index it is polling against).”

In case, if some of you are still experiencing some latencies for the recommendations to kick in it could possibly be due to certain types of Firewalls on your computers. For eg: Symantec Firewall prevents certain HTTP headers from being sent. Apparently, this is a well know issue documented on the Symantec website. This affects services like Minekey, which need the referring URL info to serve contextually relevant recommendations. Here is the setting suggested by Symantec to overcome this problem. Keep checking out our help section for future updates on this.
Additionally, we also improved some internal code logic and implemented some more optimizations to make things faster and better. We hope you will enjoy the new speed at which recommendations are served. Thanks once again to our users for helping us. We are hungry for more feedback. Keep sending us.

Some of the bloggers and end users have reported the issue about recommendations not updating frequently.

Latest post by Startup Squad mentions that while recommendations are getting updated when users click on the recommendations in the widget, they are not getting updated in line with the context of the article or when the user clicks on the articles on the page.

We appreciate the valuable feedback from all of you.

Minekey engine does provide recommendations based on the context of the article and the user’s browsing history. However, we have understood the reason behind the Latency issue here. Some of these blogs are using 3rd party Feed burning/ reporting services like Feed Burner; as a result the article’s URLs or Permalinks on the blog are quite different from the URLs in the feed. Hence, Minekey’s system wasn’t able to update the user clicks in these cases. We thank the Minekey users who have pointed this to us. We are working on a fix and we’ll roll it out in the next few days. Thanks for your patience. We’ll post an update as soon as we are done.