Two weeks ago we were approached by Luke Razzell of i-together.com to create a new facebook application called Blog Friends. Luke’s goal was to make blog-reading and discovery easy… and yet the server-side aspects of filtering keywords against users’ social networks meant for tough server-side coding. So naturally we said yes!
The genius of the application was the social network filtering, but this presented a lot of serious challenges - especially for the servers. Thankfully our friends at XCalibre came up trumps and supplied us with a dedicated database server along with a couple of beta elastic-computing “flexiscale” virtual servers.