"WHAT'S UP WITH BLOGLINES?"

Russell Beattie has a good post on some recent problems with Bloglines, which is my RSS reader of choice:

Has anyone noticed that Bloglines is really suffering since it got bought by Ask Jeeves? I was expecting improvements in the service, but instead, not much has happened that I can see. This isn’t abnormal - it took *ahem* quite a while for OddPost to turn into the new Yahoo! Mail beta after Y! bought them last year. But since I use Bloglines every day (all day), I’m starting to get really frustrated.

Oh boy! Another list of gripes! Actually, no. I’ll just say three things: They aren’t fixing bugs, they aren’t keeping up, and they aren’t innovating at all. More specificially:

Bug #1: If you go to this page, you’ll see that because my old Java system insisted on adding in a ;jessionid to the end of my feed url, it looks like I had hundreds and hundreds of feeds. Every time someone tried to automagically add a feed to Bloglines, it looked different, so Bloglines added a new feed for my site to its database. I’ve done a couple things to resolve this: I’ve emailed Bloglines support, and I’ve used mod_rewrite to return 301s - permanent redirects - for anything except my one official feed. Neither has helped. (full post)