It's bad news, good news and better news for Amatomu users. Let's start with the bad news first.

We dropped a lot of hits over the past two weeks due to some hefty fiddling on the back end of the site. These hits will not be coming back, and they have affected rankings. If you're missing hits, we sincerely apologise.

The good news is that hits are once again being accurately recorded - more accurately than ever before - and the rankings have restored to normal.

The better news for our bloggers is the reason behind the fiddling. We've been hard at work, rebuilding Amatomu from the ground up. You may have noticed in the past that Amatomu wasn't the fastest site on the Internet, even with 60 minute cache times and a dedicated server.

So we've rebuilt it on CodeIgniter (which is what we use for mg.co.za), and spent sleepless nights pouring over every technical aspect of Amatomu. No Sql query went unoptimised. We've moved servers and Amatomu is now spread between Afrihost's dedicated box and shared space with a new M&G virtual server sitting on IS architecture.

The performance differences are staggering. Before, we had to cache for up to an hour to keep Amatomu up at all. We've now dropped caching, and are serving live data. If you refresh your page you'll see things change.

We also used to process the stats in batches. That meant you could only see stats that were at best three hours old, and some that were a day or more old. Now, all stats tracking is live. If you're on your stats page, click refresh to watch your hit counters go up.

We've done a lot of work to ensure that the stats are more accurate than before. You'll see a closer correlation between Amatomu and server-side stats.

We're also much more aggressive at fetching your RSS feeds. We used to only be able to get to each feed once a day. Now, we're fetching them all in just over an hour. That means you won't have to sit around waiting for your post to pop up on Amatomu.

We've also given you the ability to tell Amatomu to go fetch your RSS feed, and we'll tell you if we're having a problem getting your feed.

There are a few other subtle improvements - you can retrieve lost passwords (finally), and we've changed the tagging system so that you can drill down to people or companies. Logging a hit is down to around 300ms - that means there's very little speed impact on your blog. And we've officially changed from "Alpha" to "Beta" phase.

We've also aggressively culled some blogs from the site. Sorry if one of them was yours, but please have a look at the T&C's as we're going to be a lot stricter about these.

The best thing about the new platform is that it gives us a lot more freedom to innovate and add new features going forward. Let us know what you'd like to see in the future, and any bugs you find on the Beta.

Kind regards
The Amatomu Team