Bloglines Problem

Bloglines has the largest marketshare of any of the RSS aggregators - approximately 30%.  Unfortunately, that means that 30% of the subscribers to Fractals of Change haven't seen any updates since Thursday.

For some reason, Bloglines is not recognizing the two posts I blogged since then and probably won't see this one either.  Even more unfortunately, if you subscribe to this blog via Bloglines you won't see this notice that you're not getting your updates.

Because I don't like not understanding things that don't work, I Googled "bloglines problems".  There is a pattern.  There are a number of other blogs which are not updating or have periodically not updated.  educational.blogs.com is one of them.  Sometimes the resolution has been for Bloglines to make some sort of mysterious reset.  Sometimes Bloglines has pointed out a deviation from standards in the feeds which, typically, Bloglines is more sensitive to than other aggregators.

I don't know yet which category my problem fits in.  Other aggregators can read the feeds.  They are produced by Typepad which is very good.  There could, of course, be some disagreement between Typepad and Bloglines on standards. I have heard back (twice) from Typepad who don't see nathing wrong and not heard back from Bloglines but only complained today.

What seems very clear to me is that Bloglines needs to show something in its service when it has been unable to read a particular feed.  Even better if they could send something to the author but that may really be too much of a burden.  If Bloglines showed that it was unable to get an update, then users would know to look at the blog directly if they care enough and bloggers would know to look for a problem - we are motivated to do that because Bloglines has such a large market share.

If you don't see an update to Fractals of Change on a weekday, something is probably wrong.  I post at least once a weekday.  Weekends I usually don't post.  Hopefully Bloglines gets fixed soon and other aggregators don't have similar problems but I thought I'd let you know the schedule.  Will post if it changes.

Comments

[Jeramey]

Bloglines does have a way to show if they can't poll the feed. They place a little red [!] next to the item that they can't retrieve. In your case though I would guess that it is showing up that it hasn't found any updates and for that there isn't a icon.

[Dennis]

I was having issues with my bloglines feed and emailed support@bloglines.com -- they responded quickly and I was able to fix the problem (on my side)..

I'm looking in bloglines and your feed has updated... Typically, if the feed doesn't update, a red [!] will appear next to the feed...

[Eric Lunt]

Hi there Tom. We've noticed this before, where sometimes Bloglines will just stop polling a feed. Usually Mark is really responsive to an email at support@bloglines.com and he does something to give his poller a kick.