Bloglines Marked All Live Journal Feeds as Broken

I noticed today that all the Live Journal feeds I subscribe to via Bloglines have a red exclamation mark next to them. This essentially means that Bloglines can’t read the feed, and thus no updates will show up for it until the feed issues are resolved.

I have been noticing more and more of those marks lately but never really thought much of them. But when all the LJ feeds went wonky at the same time I figured there might be two possibilities here:

  1. LJ fucked up it’s feeds
  2. Bloglines is not reading the feeds correctly

I exported my OPML and imported it in Google Reader just to see if I get similar behavior. Nope. Reader didn’t show any errors, and I was able to pick up the recent updates. I like Bloglines. I’m used to it. But Google Reader has some nice features too. Is it time to switch?

Update 05/03/2007 12:39:53 PM

Two quick updates:

  1. The LJ feeds seem to be working properly today
  2. The issue with updating them yesterday was apparently caused by LJ banning the bloglines feed crawler

See the comment from a Bloglines representative for more details.

Update 05/08/2007 03:54:44 PM

The LJ feeds are broken again. WTF people? Bloglines must really be itching to loose users to Google Reader. :P

[tags]bloglines, live journal, feeds, broken feeds, lj feeds, google reader, reader[/tags]

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6 Responses to Bloglines Marked All Live Journal Feeds as Broken

  1. Craig Betts UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Solaris Terminalist says:

    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 . . .

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  2. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    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. :)

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  3. Fr3d UNITED KINGDOM Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    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 :)

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  4. Paul Querna UNITED STATES Camino Mac OS says:

    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

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  5. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    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.

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  6. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

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

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