Comments on: Bloglines Still Sucks (Three Months and Counting…)

By: Paul Burdick

Paul Burdick — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 05:39:31 +0000

Ooo! You want some really fun reading? Go [url=http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3229.html]here[/url].

If you want a slightly more relevant explanation of it, check out Bob Wylan’s article [url=http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2004/09/using_rfc3229_w.html]here[/url].

Think of it as a way for feed readers to only retrieve the content that has changed since they last check. Unfortunately, Apache support for the 226 header code is non-existent.

By: Michael Feldstein

Michael Feldstein — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 05:33:10 +0000

Paul, forgive my ignorance, but what is “the RFC-3229 request stuff” and why is it important? And Mark, is Bloglines strictly enforcing RFC-3229 for a reason, or is Bloglines’ lack of a backup routine simply an oversight?

By: Paul Burdick

Paul Burdick — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 05:22:51 +0000

Depends on how Bloglines is reading and processing feeds. My first tests were simply using the If-Modified-Since header without problems. However, the A-IM header is part of the RFC-3229 request stuff and it would not surprise me if many of the other aggregators are not even using it -or- have some backup routine when there is a failure with it.

By: Michael Feldstein

Michael Feldstein — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 05:18:35 +0000

Paul, I’ll do the update as soon as I can clear the time, but I’m confused. Why is this timeout an issue for Bloglines and not for any other aggregator?

By: Michael Feldstein

Michael Feldstein — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 05:15:57 +0000

By the way, Mark, I am apparently not the only one experiencing feed update problems. You might want to check for problems with your crawler.

By: Paul Burdick

Paul Burdick — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 05:14:18 +0000

I did some further testing and it seems the combination of the If-Modifed-Since and the A-IM header will cause your feed to time out on request. I just tested this on my own site, which is running EE 1.2.1 and there is no timing out (and I believe Lisa-Jill said it was working in Bloglines). I would suggest you try updating your site to the most recent version of EE and see if that helps.

By: Michael Feldstein

Michael Feldstein — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 05:11:23 +0000

I updated my site, but to 1.1, not 1.2. And again, no other aggregator or feed reader that I can find is having trouble with updates on my feeds.

By: Paul Burdick

Paul Burdick — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 05:02:22 +0000

Michael -

Chris Curtis notified me of your problems and so here I am checking out your feeds. Did you update your backend files recently? There was a problem with the headers sent but we had the problem fixed within a few weeks of EE 1.2’s release.

Mark -

I just ran a few tests using a quick and easy PHP page reader with the If-Modified-Since headers sent with different dates (a month ago, yesterday, the contents of the Last-Modified header, etc.) and there were no time outs for any of them, so if Michael has not updated his site I am confused why Bloglines is having any problems.

By: Michael Feldstein

Michael Feldstein — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 18:40:07 +0000

If you read the comment above yours as well as this follow-up post (which, by the way, does not currently show up on the Bloglines feed), you’ll see that the problem hasn’t really been solved yet, unfortunately.

By: M.N. Lamberson

M.N. Lamberson — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 09:59:30 +0000

I actually did see this posting via my bloglines account…

Just an FYI