Sucking will continue until morale improves
What is it with me and Bloglines (we have history)? Lately it’s been all manners of busted. When I click on feeds that supposedly have unread items, Bloglines will pop up an empty list. Additionally, Bloglines has regressed to showing me TONS of feed items from as far back as a week ago, none of which have been updated.
Yesterday it started doing something new, though. I subscribe to Lifehacker. On either Wednesday or Thursday (I can’t remember which) I flagged some article using the “Keep New” checkbox. I do that a lot when I encounter an article I want to read but don’t presently have time for. Bloglines keeps it flagged new so I can go back to find it. In the left column, where Bloglines lists out my unread feeds, Bloglines shows it as “Lifehacker 0 (1)”, meaning no unread articles and one Keep New item. When I click on the feed, however, zero articles show up (there should be one).
It’s a shame that Bloglines breaks in such frustrating ways. Without the breaking, Bloglines is a very simple, usable application. It does what it should: presents you a list of your feeds and any new or updated articles. Unless it’s busted.
August 4th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
lol You ‘ve been frustrating many time with Bloglines indeed!!
For me this is the one service Yahoo! should have bought though (well maybe Writely as well)
What bugs me with Bloglines is the Yahoo! Mail Blog, I on’t know if they keep pinging Pingomatic or technorati but I always have 10 unread feed….all the time, been three months !!!
From time to time I get an exclamation mark when Bloglines was unable - for some reason - to retrieve the feed but that’s not very often and most of my feeds (99 precisely!) work very well.
I’m really surprised that you should experience those problem. I mremeber the spanish language that suddenly set up on your account.
Why don’t you try to export your feeds and import them on a new account? You might be more lucky if it’s hosted on another server….
Good luck
August 4th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
I have a better idea. I think I’m done with Bloglines.
I have the tools and (arguably) the talent to write something small scale on my own that can do exactly what Bloglines should be doing for me. If I’m lucky, I’ll learn something new in the process.
August 4th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
Wow! then let me be your official beta tester, I’m interested… seriously!
August 4th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
I have actually been using netvibes to read my feeds. It does the job just fine and much better than bloglines. I would be interested though to try out your version of bloglines. Let us know how it works and if we can use it.
August 4th, 2006 at 8:54 pm
Ha, you guys are jumping the gun. I have a day job too.
Keep an eye out, maybe this will become a hackathon weekend.