A long time ago, I wrote that I had found out about Bloglines and that I thought it was a very good RSS reader. I wish to retract that statement.
Since then, I’ve been using Bloglines as my only reader, and I like it: it has a reasonably good interface, it is fast, and it keeps track of blogs all the time, so you don’t miss posts from feeds with frequent updates. All of that is good. However, a few weeks ago it decided to stop updating one of my own feeds (yes, I subscribe to my own blogs). I contacted their support team, and they told me the feed was not valid and pointed me to an online validator. I went there, fixed the error it pointed out (an invalid character), made sure it validated and waited for Bloglines to pick it up. And waited. And waited.
It hasn’t picked up on it yet. It’s been two months since it last showed new items. Even though their robot is still checking for updates to the RSS feed every few hours, and downloading it when it’s modified. That despite I having contacted Bloglines again; they never gave a definite answer.
Meanwhile, I noticed other people on the blogosphere complaining that Bloglines would every now and then “skip” articles. So, today I downloaded RSS Reader, imported my list of feeds, waited for it to update all of them and, what do you know? Bloglines is dropping articles left and right! I didn’t do a thorough check, but on a quick sample I noticed several missing articles.
Needless to say, I’m not coming back. I will certainly miss the ability of checking my feeds from different computers, but I can live with that (I haven’t found any other usable online reader, but I’m accepting suggestions). And I would no longer recommend using Bloglines, as you will probably not be seeing all articles in the feeds you subscribe to.
[Update 24.05.2005: A Bloglines employee left a comment on this entry and I sent him more information regarding the problem.]
[Update II 26.05.2005: Mark, it seems e-mails are not getting through to you, even though they are handed over to your servers; if you see this entry, please look at the comment I added.]
4 comments ↓
I’m sorry to hear about your experience with Bloglines. I did some investigating, and it appears that your server is blocking one of our crawlers. We operate 3 crawling machines, and the one at IP address 216.148.212.182 can’t access your site. That explains why one of your feeds hasn’t been updating.
Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks.
Hmm, I never received the email. Can you send it again, to markf (at) bloglines.com? Thanks.
Mark, it seems my e-mails are not getting through to you. I wonder if Bloglines has connectivity issues, or if it is just an over-zealous anti-spam system. The messages are handed to your server correctly, as far as I can see. In any case, here’s what I wrote:
Thanks for your contact. About what you said:
“I’m sorry to hear about your experience with Bloglines. I did some investigating, and it appears that your server is blocking one of our crawlers. We operate 3 crawling machines, and the one at IP address 216.148.212.182 can’t access your site. That explains why one of your feeds hasn’t been updating.”
That’s really strange. I’m certainly not blocking any hosts, and I will take this matter to my hosting provider. Indeed, the only requests I see in my logs come from 216.148.212.188 and 216.148.212.187.
Regarding the other issue, one of the feeds where I noticed missing articles is http://www.guru-international.com/gday_mate/atom.xml ; the articles entitled “Fortune of the Day”, still listed in the atom.xml file, do not show up on Bloglines, even when I select the “Display items within the last month” option. I’m not sure if this is related to having several articles with the same title or not.
Also, a common, recurring issue is to have the left-hand bar showing a feed as having, say, 3 unread articles, and seeing only two articles when I click on it. This happens quite consistently with the feed http://www.havesometea.net/MadTeaParty/atom.xml. I don’t know which information is correct (two or three new articles), but it isn’t very reassuring…
Again, thanks for your comment. I really like Bloglines (as I said, I don’t think any other online reader comes close to it in usability, and I don’t think too highly of the desktop clients either), and I would like it to be reliable at all times.
Regards,
-Wilson
[...] Quite a while ago, I wrote about my disappointment with Bloglines (in a post that actually got a few responses from their team) and, later, with stand-alone feed readers. In the end, after using Omea Reader for a while, I ended up gravitating back to Bloglines (especially after I moved to Linux on my desktop machine) and stayed happily there (but always wondering about possible missing posts…). [...]
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