Blog Yellek

Bloglines is an RSS aggregator (for a discussion on what RSS is see my previous post) that collects information from RSS and atom feeds and displays them to you in one easy to use interface. On the left is a list of feeds with the number of items you haven’t read in each feed displayed and the rest of the screen is made up of the items in the feed you have selected.

The site is AJAX enabled so that when you select an item or perform an action it doesn’t do a time wasting page refresh but rather shows you the information right there and then like a desktop application. It has facilities to import your OPML file (a common XML format used by feed aggregators to store your list of feeds) so getting all of your feeds set up is quick and easy.

This is all fine but after using Bloglines for a while I began to realise that it was losing feed items, feed items that I might have wanted to read . I even saw an instance where I did something to try and see the feed items in one feed and it marked all the items in my other feeds read without asking me. When I e-mailed their tech support about this I got the following response:

“This issue sometimes occurs when you have a particular feed marked to ‘Ignore’ any ‘Updated Items.’ You can edit these settings by clicking the ‘Edit’ link above your subscription list, and then clicking the feed in question. Change the ‘Updated Items’ option from ‘Ignore’ to ‘Display as New.’ Please let us know if this does not resolve the problem.”

Note that I already had all my feeds set to ‘Display As New’ as they had suggested and that the response bore no relation to my original problem. After this I had no confidence that I was actually being notified of new items in my feeds and no confidence in the responsiveness of tech support to fix the problem. I took my OPML file and switched readers to Newsgator (which I’ll cover in another review).

I know that everyone raves about Bloglines but I can’t in all conscience reccommend it due to these fundamental flaws.

At the recent BloggerCon conference and in a recent Bloglines news post users were asked to tag posts about services with the tags Bloglines and Freedbacking so I’m doing that for this post. In case anyone from Bloglines is reading this the support case number I refer to is 060522-004580.

Bloglines is an RSS aggregator (for a discussion on what RSS is see my previous post) that collects information from RSS and atom feeds and displays them to you in one easy to use interface. On the left is a list of feeds with the number of items you haven’t read in each feed displayed and the rest of the screen is made up of the items in the feed you have selected.

The site is AJAX enabled so that when you select an item or perform an action it doesn’t do a time wasting page refresh but rather shows you the information right there and then like a desktop application. It has facilities to import your OPML file (a common XML format used by feed aggregators to store your list of feeds) so getting all of your feeds set up is quick and easy.

This is all fine but after using Bloglines for a while I began to realise that it was losing feed items, feed items that I might have wanted to read . I even saw an instance where I did something to try and see the feed items in one feed and it marked all the items in my other feeds read without asking me. When I e-mailed their tech support about this I got the following response:

“This issue sometimes occurs when you have a particular feed marked to ‘Ignore’ any ‘Updated Items.’ You can edit these settings by clicking the ‘Edit’ link above your subscription list, and then clicking the feed in question. Change the ‘Updated Items’ option from ‘Ignore’ to ‘Display as New.’ Please let us know if this does not resolve the problem.”

Note that I already had all my feeds set to ‘Display As New’ as they had suggested and that the response bore no relation to my original problem. After this I had no confidence that I was actually being notified of new items in my feeds and no confidence in the responsiveness of tech support to fix the problem. I took my OPML file and switched readers to Newsgator (which I’ll cover in another review).

I know that everyone raves about Bloglines but I can’t in all conscience reccommend it due to these fundamental flaws.

At the recent BloggerCon conference and in a recent Bloglines news post users were asked to tag posts about services with the tags Bloglines and Freedbacking so I’m doing that for this post. In case anyone from Bloglines is reading this the support case number I refer to is 060522-004580.