Monthly Archive for December, 2006

More updates…

Hi, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas time! I will use this blog post to share some updates with you.

First of all, the new website: it took a while, but it seems that the new server setup is working fine now. We still need to fine-tune some areas, which will happen next week. Thanks everyone for reporting bugs and glitches!

Some people noticed that specific search queries return wrong results. For example, searching on “French” only returns old torrents. We hope to fix this issue in a few days. Update January 6: this problem is solved now.

Some other people reported that searching for “bla” does not return results for torrents with the name “blabla”. This so called “prefixed searching” is not possible yet with the new searching backend (Sphinx), but we hope to have this fixed somewhere in January. Update January 8: and this problem has been solved as well.

Enough about technical issues, on to the good news: several news sources (BBC, CTV, Torrentfreak) reported that “Mininova” was the ninth most Googled term in 2006. It’s good to see our site between the top-10 most popular search terms, but it probably also means the homepage of Mininova is not very trivial to find. We promise you we’re going to work on this issue next year!

And now for something else, the guys over at BitLord have released a TV show for the BitTorrent community. Mininova also plays a prominent part being the sponsor of the Torrent Top List. The guys at BitLord told me the first episode would be a first attempt at a show so they will improve it as time goes. But I have to say, the first episode is a nice start. Make sure to download the first episode here.

OK, that’s it for now… have a nice year-end and till next time!

Christmas update: big site changes

Hi everyone!

Just a few days left and it’s Christmas, the time of the year you spend with family, friends and… browsing the new & improved Mininova ;)

As you may have noticed, the site has undergone huge changes. We moved the site to a new hoster and datacenter, which will drastically improve performance. The search backend of the site has also been rewritten, resulting in a faster (and hopefully better) search experience.

After months of development and testing, we’re also introducing a new layout for Mininova. Extra functionality has been added and existing features are easier to use now. For example the “Jump to category” drop down box will help you quickly go to your favorite section, but also quite a few other cool but subtle features have been added.

This doesn’t mean the site is perfect now. In fact, we’re quite sure there are still some bugs & errors left, which we didn’t spot. In case you do, please let us know, and we’ll be happy to fix them! Same counts for the layout: please let us know your ideas to improve the layout.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you!

Thanks for using Mininova.