Bloglines Problems – Seriously Concerned

http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/comments/223/

I am a huge fan of Bloglines and use it ever day (some people even claim I have an RSS ‘habit’ and need help). So I have been increasingly concerned with the weird behaviour I have seen over the past weeks in Bloglines. Specifically, I’ve noticed feed counts getting updated but the feed contents not displaying when you go to read them unless you specifically force it to display the last x days. The other problem I’ve reported is that the Bloglines search facility is demonstrably not working on a regular basis.

I’ve emailed Bloglines and got a response on both problems that they were ‘looking into the problem.’ O.k., great; it’s a free service and they replied in under a day, which is pretty impressive.

But then quite by chance today I went back to Michael Feldstein’s e-literate site because in the back of my mind I wondered why I hadn’t seen anything from his blog of late. And there I found the above post which indicates that Bloglines hasn’t been updating his feed for quite some time. I unsubscribed and resubscribed and he’s right – sometime back in October the feed stopped being updated and you can’t get anymore through Bloglines.

I don’t know about you, but if you are a Bloglines user I would suggest this is VERY unsettling news. Anyone else experiencing weirdness like this? (I’ve turned off comments recently as my ISP helpfully broke my MT-blacklist comment spam filter with a PERL upgrade, but please email me or post on your own blog if you are experiencing similar difficulties. The irony being of course that if you read this feed through Bloglines, who knows if you will or won’t see this post). And as Will Richardson recently reminded folks, back up your OPML files. – SWL