The LJ feeds are broken again. WTF? I think it’s seriously high time to switch to Google Reader.

Thanks for the info Paul! I noticed that I don’t have the exclamation marks on my feeds anymore. Awesome!

Of course this beggs a question: why on earth would LJ ban any feed crawlers? Why would anyone ban them for that matter? I just don’t see any business sense in such a move.

Hello,

This was caused by the Bloglines Feed Crawler being banned by LiveJournal. We have been working with the LiveJournal operations team over the last 2 days to resolve this issue, and as of this morning, the feeds should start returning to normal.

Thanks,

Paul Querna
Bloglines Engineer

I used to use Firefox’s built-in feeds, but I decided to try out Google Reader a month ago… And I must say, I’m hooked like Craig – it’s really easy to use, and handy to have them all in one place, that I can read anywhere on any PC :)

Btw, Bloglines is also web-based.

I like the “mark read as you scroll by” feature in Google Reader. Bloglines marks the whole feat as read when you click on it which is sometimes annoying. I also like that the Reader doesn’t load all the feed items at once. Sometime if I fall behind on reading an image heavy feed, and I get 200 messages accumulated in it, bloglines will attempt to load them all at once. This usually means that Firefox slows to a crawl or even freezes up for a bit while the images are loaded.

Then again Bloglines seems to be snappier when it comes to usual day to day activities.

I’m seriously considering switching but I’m not sure yet. :)

I have been running Google Reader since it was released. I must say that I am totally hooked! I used to use Thunderbird, but it was a pain syncing it with my system at home. Having a web-based solution fixed that. I also like the vi-like key bindings (J and K to navigate up and down). It blends in well with my GMail stuff as well. My only complaint is that it is not yet available on Google for Domains. OFW . . .