Saturday, July 16, 2005

Haloscan's RSS is Down

You may have come here to find out if LastHalo has indeed gone out of service. Actually no, at the mean time, Haloscan's RSS feed of latest comments, which LastHalo is depending on, is not functioning properly. Hence, LastHalo would not be able to retrieve the latest comments on your Haloscan account.

Please wait a few moments, with the efficiency of Haloscan team, it would be functioning again.

As for the increasing hosting cost of LastHalo, I currently have a plan in mind. As LastHalo hasn't been updated for such a long time, due to my university vacation, I believe it's time for further improvements (especially presentation wise and other features), and also some bug-fixing time (especially the problem in displaying characters of foreign languages).

When I'm finally done so, I would most probably be releasing LastHalo in 2 versions. One is the basic functional version which costs nothing to be installed on your blog (in fact I'm paying for it, as I'm donating my bandwidth), another version would be the enhanced version with the extra features and configurations to make LastHalo's sidebar more suitable for your site's presentation. The latter version would require a small subscription fees.

Don't worry. I would not be charging high. My proposed fee structures would be somewhat like Haloscan's, $12 fo 12 months of premium account which should be affordable for most power users. In fact, for non-subscriptin members, they would not miss out anything on LastHalo as they will still be getting basic sweet little functional LastHalo sidebar as it is now.

Thanks everybody for your generous positive response and telling me that they would be willing to donate should LastHalo requires so. It means a lot as an encouragement to me to continue to support LastHalo. I would not be accepting any donations for now as I believe, one, it is only a temporary solution; two, I believe that LastHalo would need some improvements to be subscription-worthy.

Once again, thank you guys for your continuous support for LastHalo!

Yours,
Chua U-Zyn

Update: Haloscan's RSS and LastHalo is working fine now. Looks like the Haloscan team has just made the anchored links to each comments. LastHalo would be updated to cater for that soon.