Bloglines woes

A reader of the Life of Jalo contacted us with problems with the feeds updating in Bloglines. This problem appears to be directly related to the problems Bloglines has in understanding Atom 1.0 feeds.

What’s interesting about the problem is that the feed view in Bloglines isn’t incorrect, it just doesn’t update. At least regularly and in sync with changes to the feed. The same problem seems to apply to several other feeds as well. Using the Bloglines discorey options for a feed on a site this blog got to different feed options. Of which the Atom once was last updated sometime last year according to the feed. Their system doesn’t even recognize any of the feeds on the Life of Jalo front-page even though all of the feeds validate.

While I don’t use Bloglines myself, I find the system quite handy and can see the uses for many people (especially if they use multiple computers to follow feeds). However, the current problems in the implementation and the impossibility of causing Bloglines to update its view of a feed render it practically unusable. At least its reliability is highly suspect.

And the solution to our readers problems? Try subscribing (directly) to either the RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 feed which appear to work. At least for now. And here I was thinking of scrapping both of the RSS variants.

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