As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty happy with Bloglines. It does (pretty much) one thing and does a good job of it. Nothing is perfect though. For several days I haven’t been able to read one of my feeds (a PubSub subscription for everything that contains the word PostgreSQL). Initially I figured I would just wait it out for a day or two, by then they would probably have caught it one their own and then everything would be fine. When that didn’t happen I used their contact form to make them aware of what was going on. I got an email back within a day indicating that they would “reset that feed” and hopefully everything would be fine within a day or two. I’m not sure what was meant by reseting that feed since the number of unread messages continued to climb.
So I waited for another couple of days, but still nothing. I should describe in a bit more detail what is happening. Normally when you click on a feed subscription in Bloglines it calls some JavaScript and displays the unread entries in the larger right hand frame. It then considers those entries read unless indicate otherwise. In this case what happens is when I click on my troubled feed the right hand frame gets an HTTP error 500 (an internal server error). So their web server got my request, tried to process it and ran into an error while doing so. The result is that I’m unable to read any entries for this feed and the number of unread entries continues to increase.
In an effort to be a little more helpful in explaining what is happening, I dissected some of their JavaScript to determine the exact URL that is being requested. I emailed them back indicating the feed was still not viewable and provided them with the exact URL to use (when logged in as me) to reproduce it. I sent that last night and I still haven’t heard back from them. I can sympathize that such a popular service is growing like mad and being recently purchased by a new company will cause a lot stress and difficulty on a company. But this shouldn’t be rocket science. I’d expect that they’d be monitoring their systems so as to be notified as soon as possible when one of then servers falls over or starts generating errors.
Please Bloglines, don’t let me down.
Oh, and I still haven’t received my I Love Bloglines shirt yet, even though it was supposed to be mailed out on the 14th of March. If I don’t see it by the end of the week I’ll send another email asking if it ever got sent. Can’t complain too much, the shirt is free after all 🙂