I had hoped that I wouldn’t have to post this, but it seems to be my only recourse at this point.
Apparently, the Bloglines aggregator stopped updating my feed several months ago. I had no idea that this was happening; nor did my readers who subscribe through Bloglines. As far as they knew, I just wasn’t posting. Lucky for me, Amy Gahran decided to check my site after six weeks of silence and discovered that my site had indeed been updated. Once she alerted me of the problem, I emailed Bloglines immediately and got a “we’re looking into it” response within a couple of hours. A few days later, I checked the feed and thought it had been fixed. But I was mistaken; it still wasn’t updated. I have poked the Bloglines customer service email address a couple of more times over a period of several weeks, but they have never again responded to me; nor have they fixed the problem. A week ago, I sent them an email asking them to at least notify my Bloglines feed subscribers that the feed was down. Again, no response.
Now, it’s bad enough that there has been a silent failure for several months that might never have been discovered. It’s worse that customer service is totally out to lunch. But worst of all is that I have no idea if e-Literate is the only broken feed. I suspect that it isn’t. For all we know, there could be silent failures happening all across the Bloglines service.
I was seriously thinking about using Bloglines for my Windows machine, but I have concluded that I just can’t trust it. One broken feed from a site is bad enough. But I’d have no way of knowing if even dozens of my feeds were silently failing through their centralized system. Until they can provide substantially better assurances regarding quality and consistency of service, I’m afraid I’m going to have to recommend to people that they avoid using Bloglines.
Michael Feldstein is the founder of e-Literate who currently works as the Senior Program Manager for MindTap at Cengage Learning. For more information, see his profile page.
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If it is any comfort, you are not the only one falling through the cracks at Bloglines.
Dang……….
Just as I finished opening a Blogline account but, luckily, before I spent any serious time trying to fiigure it out!
Stephen Downes had suggested that as a good place to get started but based on what you report, perhaps not. Do you have an alternative perhaps for a novice?
Patrick
Paul, “comfort” is not the word I would use, though I appreciate the confirmation that this is not an isolated case.
Patrick, I’m not sure what to recommend. I was actually in the process of setting up a Bloglines account to teach some newbies myself when this problem turned up. It’s going to be an issue with any centralized aggregator, I suppose. I found NetNewsWire to be a very easy client to learn on the Mac; I’ve yet to find one on the PC that I like. If you’re a Firefox user, you could try one of the several RSS extensions available for it. NewsGator is another option; it uses the familiar Outlook as its interface.
I too, have fallen through the ‘Bloglines cracks.’ I guess you get what you pay for, and unfortunately in this situation, that adds up to little other than the scattered reply stating that they’re experiencing some server problem or another. It’s not a problem with my feeds, as they display just fine via every other aggregator I’ve tried. But Bloglines has reached critical mass as aggregators go, and there’s really no accountability at all. I wonder if things might change for the better with Ask Jeeves coming on the scene . . . we can always hope.