This is SuprBlog.

Say hello to another one of our SuprGluist, Phil Leitch. Three questions, three answers:

1. Who are you?

My name is Phil and I’m an information architect in Fargo, ND. Actually I’m sort of a jack-of-all-trades-and-whatever-other-people-don’t-want-to-figure-out person more than anything. I have a lovely wife named Jess and six awesome pets (5 cats and a dog). I’ve recently found out that I have at least some level of carpentry skills and totally enjoy building stuff for our house and in our big yard in the country.

2. What would you do everyday if you didn’t have to work?

Fortunately my job affords me the chance to do a lot of what I really like doing. Messing around with code, constantly reading my 100’s of RSS feeds for the latest Web happenings or Apple news. So if I didn’t have to bother with actually working I’d probably build a nice addition to our house, make myself a nice geek-out room, set it up with the latest and greatest mac products and work on my own Web-related projects rather than working for the man. Oh, and try to figure out Lost.

3. 3 things you’d bring with you to an island, for a week?

That’s funny, I didn’t even know this Island question was next. For a week, let’s see. I think I’d definitely bring my wife. Now this is always the tricky part. If I bring my laptop or ipod does the battery magically stay charged for the week or am I just out of luck. If it stays charged then I bring my laptop as one item. If no magic batteries exist then I guess I bring my pet unicorn and a sci-fi anthology. The unicorn is cool right?

Thanks, Phil!

fontgoddess was kind enough to donate to the Glu Factory, and we asked her three questions. Here are her answers,

“Don’t believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.”
~ Douglas Adams

1. Who are you?

I am an art student at the University of Wyoming. I am also an active netizen, using the username “fontgoddess” at many places all over the web (although I am not the only fontgoddess. hmmm.).

2. What would you do everyday if you didn’t have to work?

Currently I am unemployed. Please hire me. Seriously. In between looking for jobs, I watch a lot of television on DVD, surf the web, listen to music, organize my music metadata, go mountain biking, work on art projects, and work on my super-secret plan to topple MySpace — I mean nap. Yeah, nap.

3. 3 things you’d bring with you to an island, for a week?

If I were to be on an island for a week I would bring:

• a pillow (for all that lazing about)
• my iPod (for an island soundtrack of Judy Garland, bastard pop, showtunes, trip-hop, and whatever else is randomly assigned to my iPod’s playlist)
• sunscreen (as I am so pale I’m just one shade darker than clear)

we shall purge! All archived material will be flushed, and SuprGlu will come back thinner and livelier than before. Rejoice!

We shall be back next week with more to report.

For those of you who have not heard, we have also started a little online publication for all you small business owners, freelancers, and like-minded folks out there. It’s called Hear, Hear - a place where we talk about creativity, marketing, common sense, and interview interesting people and businesses. Everything is written from a small business’ point of view (us), so it’s practical, modest, and - my favorite adjective in the world - good.

Dear everyone,

It’s been a long time - seven months, to be sure. Where has all the time go? Where did SuprGlu go? What have you been doing this summer? Why did Zidane do it?

Humble I will try to answer the second question. We created SuprGlu as an experiment back in October of last year, and it was quite a pleasant surprise to see the thousands of users in the first couple of months. As we saw the traffic grow, however, we also saw a tremendous drop in SuprGlu’s performance. It was quite drastic (and tragic), and soon the refresh rate became unbearably slow.

We wanted to work on SuprGlu and make it better. We had lots of ideas to make it even more interesting, but our server was sagging and costing money, and it didn’t make sense to sink more cold-cash into a fun, but non-revenue generating service. Because we intended for SuprGlu to be an experiment (in technology and in building a service in a few weeks), we did not create it with a business model in mind. After we launched, we thought about it, and could not come up with a solid business model (that did not involve lame advertising schemes)… And so we decided to just put the Glu on ice and work on another idea we have had for a long time.

The other idea came to be Harvest, which is a simple (and beautiful) time tracking application. We were a consulting company for some years, and we were always looking for an application to keep track of our time. We looked everywhere and found most things clunky and expensive, so we decided to just create our own. This application has a much clearer business model: we charge people to use our service (with reasonable and affordable prices). The product was launched in March and it has been growing steadily since. (And you will notice a little ad from Harvest on your page - yes, Harvest is sponsoring us to keep SuprGlu going!)

And now - now we finally have some time to ourselves and we will give back to SuprGlu. Here are some immediate changes:

1. We’re removing your archived data. A lighter database means a happier and faster SuprGlu. Currently we’re keeping all your data, and we will change our policy to keep just your two latest months’. If you would like for us to keep your old data, let us know (email us - feedback (at) suprglu.com) and please kindly donate $20, and we will keep your valuable data for one year.
2. No more forum. Our forum was filled with spam… What the heck? Do people have too much time at work? Please feel free to use this blog as a forum, and email us if you have questions about your account. We will (hopefully, fingers crossed) create a forum within SuprGlu later.
3. More goodies on SuprBlog. Oh yes, we got stories to tell, news to share. Keep up with us by checking back or subscribing to our blog. We will talk about interesting new web-apps that are worth gluing, interesting SuprGlu pages (oh there are a lot…), and observations about the ever-expanding universe - amongst other things.

Well… That’s about it for now. You will hear from us. Very soon. Thank you.

P.S. The title refers to a little summer movie by Bryan Singer. Ha.

Hope everyone’s had a happy new year and pleasant holidays! Things have been busy in the SuprGlu camp. We’ve taken time out to address a major issue, and that is to improve the refresh rate of the feeds for our users. SuprGlu graduated to new servers over the holidays and we’re happy to announce that our users’ feeds are now refreshed quicker and more consistently than ever before.

With plenty of behind-the-scenes work out of the way, we’re turning our attention back to improving and expanding our platform. Thanks to all the users who have sent in feedback, we’ve taken a look at every one of them and will start making some more feature related announcements soon.

A last minute note, we will be making an appearance (and contributing a presentation on SuprGlu) in this weekend’s BarCamp in New York City. If you’ll be attending, please come by and say hello!

Quite a few things have been happening behind the scenes here at SuprGlu. Here are some highlights:

1. We launched the Glu Factory. You may have noticed the factory illustration on the top of SuprGlu pages. We wanted to give our users some insight to the people behind SuprGlu, the service’s origins, and the current situation. At the heart of it, we are three individuals focused on creating a socially interesting service, and we could use your help!
2. If you’re curious to read more about us, check out the interview with us over at Emily Chang’s eHub.
3. Some very good news: We have secured a much more powerful server situation and will be migrating everything over within the next 24 hours. If you encounter a “Factory is temporarily closed” page within the next few hours, it just means the migration is happening and you should check back in a couple hours! Once the dust has settled from the move, we hope we’ll have a much improved refresh rate for everyone.

Thanks for all the feedback people have been sending in, and please do keep them coming!

Our fellow SuprGluist, entropicurity, wrote a comprehensive tutorial in our forum regarding gluing your MySpace blog.

In short, you need to find the feed URL for your MySpace blog and use our custom feed box to add that source. To find the URL, go to your MySpace blog page, view source, and on top there will be a line that looks like,

Where the “########” represents your friendID, and your MySpace’s blog’s feed is “http://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=########”.

Thanks entropicurity!

Thanks to contributions from our users, we now have a few more styles for your choosing! Just log in to your account and find these user-created templates under “Pick new template.” Your SuprGlu page is the home for your collected self, so make it a place that suits your taste. We hope these templates offer alternative starting points for your own customization. More fun features are in the works and in just a few days, we’ll be making an announcement about the Glu Factory, where we’ll talk about SuprGlu’s origins, the state of current affairs, and the future of Gluing!

Lots have been happening behind the scenes here at the SuprGlu factory. Today, we give you SuprTags! For those of you that already use services that support tagging, such as del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, etc., you’ll be glad to know that we’ve been keeping track of your tags! Along the side-column of your page, you will notice a new section called SuprTags. These are comprised of your twenty most popular tags displayed with varying scale based on usage across your sources. For example, if I clicked on my “nyc” tag, I can expect to see photos, bookmarks, and blog entries I’ve created and tagged “nyc.” It’s an easy way for me to explore my own information as it’s organized across mutiple communities. Moreover, it’s interesting for others to look through my tags and see what is important to me. We hope this will bring you another dimension of fun and exploration with SuprGlu. Please let us know what you think.

We’ve also improved support for our “Links for the day” display so that your links from sources like digg, shadows, furl, and blinklist will be wrapped up in a tidy list format similarly to how del.icio.us links have been presented.

We’re not the only ones hard at work for SuprGlu though. Our users have been a big help, and today we want to give a big thanks to kosmar for creating a SuprGlu button! Please feel free to grab it for inclusion on your site and help spread the goodness. And more user-created buttons for the community are always welcomed!

Lastly, we want to touch upon the never ending question of “How long does it take my SuprGlu page to refresh?!” We are a tiny company trying to accomplish some big things. Some users may experience long delays between their page refreshs, and we are sincerely sorry about that and wish this wasn’t the case. Quite simply, we have limited resources and the site has grown considerably in scale. Our one server is constantly busy tracking thousands of feeds from our users right now, and it can only work so fast. We’re not Google, and we don’t have server farms to muscle through all the feeds out there. If anyone wants to explore the possibility of partnering with us in providing hosting/servers/etc., please get in touch. While we are sorting that out, please rest assured that we are also working on other ways to improve your page refresh experience and will have an announcement on that soon!