What you need to know:

• The change will take place Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011 and affects access to all PostRank APIs described at http://apidocs.postrank.com.
• Existing customers and trial users should not be affected. PostRank will contact you to confirm that you have a valid API key. Please ensure that you are using the correct API key. No other changes will need to be made on your end.
• PostRank will make an effort to contact all users with old API keys before the change. If you are a current API user and have not received an updated key, or would like to confirm your key, please contact peter@postrank.com for assistance.

However, we also discovered a bug that, long story short, was also nullifying verified sites, thus resulting in folks trying to login and getting the same message. The bug has been fixed, but people are still going to have to re-verify at least one site.

We’re really sorry about that. But we are working on letting everyone know and making it as painless as possible. If you’re particularly peeved, shoot me a tweet or an email and I will send you one of our finest mea culpa t-shirts.

So, how do you re-verify your site(s) and make this nuisance a distant memory for us all? Why, I’ll tell you…

Start by logging in to your PostRank Connect account. As a side note, affected members will get the verification notification when they login to their PostRank Analytics account, too, with a link to Connect to complete the verification.

Once logged in, click on the Your Websites tab under Profile Builder to get you where you need to go to verify an RSS-enabled website and complete your Connect account verification. You can either verify a site already listed there — don’t forget to add topics and descriptions! — or a new site.

Tip: often adding an image is the easiest verification method, though our system has to be able to “see” it from the homepage, so don’t put it at the end of an old blog post, for example. (And once you’ve verified you can delete the image or other verification method.)

Also make sure that under Edit Settings for the site that you check the Connect this site with publishers checkbox.

Once those updates are saved, you should be good to go. If you notice any additional quirks or whatnot with your account, though, do let us know.

The plan is to take it down at 11am EST, and we anticipate having it back up within about an hour (so around noon EST). During this time you will not be able to login to PostRank Analytics accounts or view posts and metrics.

We don’t like doing maintenance during business hours unless absolutely necessary, and we apologize for the inconvenience. In good news, folks should see faster performance in their Analytics after the upgrade.

Any questions, etc., drop us a line.

We’ve had to retire the Topic API, which means that folks with PostRank.com accounts can no longer export a single, aggregated topic feed from either a topic they’ve created of feeds they’ve imported into their account, or from one of the global topics.

Those who have topic feeds in their RSS readers, etc. will find they no longer work and throw an error. Those feeds can be deleted, as the removal of the Topic API is not temporary (as I initially thought — sorry ’bout that).

Mashup apps also using the API will have stopped working correctly as well.

So what can you still do? All these things!

• Import RSS feeds into your PostRank account.
• Tag feeds in your subscriptions with keywords to create topics.
• Filter feeds based on keywords and/or your desired PostRank filtering level.
• Export the filtered version of individual RSS feeds.
• Export OPML files of user topic or global topic feeds.

Re. that last point, the only difference from before is that you’re exporting all the individual filtered feeds (and would have to separate them with a Google Reader folder or something like that), rather than a single, aggregated feed of all the original feeds in the topic.

This change does not affect PostRank Analytics accounts.

Any questions or whatnot, give me a shout.

Our Architectural Overview of the PostRank Engagement System intends to define what we are doing and why.  While this paper will not go into specific technical details of how we build our stuff and scale it out across Amazon’s EC2 cloud, we are setting the context for our system, defining what we calculate and how. (We’ll geek out about some of the challenges and lessons of building and scaling our stuff a bit later, you can be sure.)  For those that are interested in how Social Engagement is calculated, this is the document for you.

Social Engagement is an evolving concept. We’ve been talking to advertising agencies and networks, marketers, researchers, public relations, news sites, media companies and analytics platforms. Across the board they all have highly variable and interesting points of view on what engagement is, how useful it is and what to do with it.

We’d love to get your take on our approach and especially hear what you would do with content and engagement data since the real-time content stream, social engagement monitoring, and two years of archival data are available as part of our Data Services products. We want to hear your ideas. Let’s Get Started.

You can get the new version of the extension here: http://gr.postrank.com.

We WILL make sure to let everyone know once the upgrade is done and the extension is working with Firefox 3.5.

2) We ARE working on it.

3) I know, you’ve probably heard me say that before. Sorry about that. Trust me, no one wishes it was a quick fix more than we do.

It’s been a combination of things — upgrading the system, then troubleshooting to clean up some small issues that came up, and then a couple other things that have been maddeningly persistent and elusive. (You know how sometimes when things go wrong it’s just one little thing after another? Yeah, it’s like that.)

You may even have noticed that the issues are intermittent with posts showing up in the widget (or not), or posts and metrics showing up (and being updated in a timely manner) on your PostRank page (or not).

Again, we apologize for the instability, and we will get it licked. Unfortunately, at this point I don’t know exactly when things will be working properly. Also, once the system’s functioning right, we’ll have a backlog of new feeds, new posts, and new metrics to analyze, and THEN we’ll be back in tip top shape.

As soon as things are working properly, I’ll make sure everyone knows.

In good news, while the delays are a pain, in the end they stand for good things being afoot. We’re getting through the bulky part of converting to a new feeds system. The end result will be bigger, better, faster (though I am told it still won’t allow really awesome posts to go up to 11 — sorry).

From what we can see at this point, the work hasn’t fully broken anything, just slowed down the functions that grab new posts and their engagement metrics. We’re not missing the data, we just haven’t processed it yet. But we will.

Things should be working properly, and much faster, within a couple of days. Until then, there are only limited things we can do, so mostly we’re really grateful if you could just be patient a bit longer.

Of course, if, once we’re into next week, if things are still looking way behind for you or something else appears to have gone completely pear-shaped, please let us know. (When things are done and working properly, we’ll be in touch.)

• adding new feeds to the system
• gathering/analyzing metrics for new and existing feeds
• display of feeds’ posts and metrics on postrank.com
• updating and display of feeds in Google Reader.

We’ll be working on confirming that reported issues are fixed and getting back to those who reported them via email, Twitter, and Get Satisfaction as soon as we can. (That includes older issues people reported that we couldn’t confirm were fixed while the issue was ongoing.)

The system is also now processing the backlog of new feeds to add to the system, and new posts to update with engagement. That should be caught up within 24 hours.

In the mean time, if you notice any new issues, please let us know on Get Satisfaction by Reporting a problem.

Thanks to those who’ve reported problems, and for your patience while we get caught up.