Bloggers Buzz

Bloglines has vowed to fix some problems as they are Working to Make Things Better:

Bloglines recently experienced software difficulties that affect a small number of members who use some of our advanced features. For example, you may have saved some articles by clicking on “Keep as New” and found that it doesn’t link back to the saved posts. We have isolated the issue in a system that manages the data for Bloglines blogs and clippings (resulting in the interruption of those features as well for a few users) and our engineers are working to resolve this problem.

We sincerely apologize for the disruption and we’re working to make things right. We know how important these personalization features are to Bloglines fans (we all love them, too), and we appreciate your understanding and patience.

blogging, rss, feeds, rss readers, feed readers, bloglines,

Bloglines have posted on some issues users are having with feeds catching up:

We are aware that some users have been seeing inaccurate counts on their subscription lists. This is related to the maintanance we performed Wednesday, August 3rd which included upgrades to our databases. Unfortunately, due to the massive amount of data we store, many of the systems are taking a few days to catch up with work. There is no loss of data or functionality, but the sheer size of the synchronization is causing the inaccuracies in count to occur. We are working to speed up the synchronization and remove this bottleneck from the system in the future. In the meantime, we apologize for this inconvenience and disruption to your Bloglines reading rituals.

bloglines,

Bloglines has via their blog updated on their proposal to keep designated RSS feeds out of various search and aggregator indexes which works like this:

This issue bloggers and publishers are facing is similar to the issue robots.txt addressed. Sites that don’t want to be publicized or easily accessible to the masses use robots.txt to tell search engines not to crawl or index their pages without having to set up password authentication systems that would overly restrict their visitor community. By most accounts, the robots.txt standard has been largely successful in doing just that.

Our proposal for a Feed Access Control Standard is about creating a robots.txt-like standard for feeds. Bloggers and publishers who don’t want their feeds to be publicized will be able to tell search engines, aggregators and other feed crawlers to exclude their feed from listings, directories and search engine indexes.

We recognize that this proposed standard explicitly does not address republication. But just as robots.txt has done, it will act as a sign post to a search engine or an aggregator that a particular feed’s content (the content in the feed itself, not just on the page that is linked to from the feed) should not be indexed. Like a stop sign, the value is in making everyone aware of the rules of the road. As with any rule of the road, it relies on the community to adhere to it to prevent “accidents.”

Tags: bloglines, feeds, rss, syndication, feed readers, rss readers

From the Bloglines Blog:

Bloglines suffered intermittent service to a set of its users between the times of 10:30 PM PDT August 2 and 12:00 AM PDT August 3rd. The culprit has been identified and fixed. All services are once again operating normally and there is no impact on subscriptions, accounts, or data. We apologize for this inconvenience

Tags: bloglines, feeds, rss, syndication tools

Bloglines is seeking to implement a new Feed Access Control Standard for RSS and ATOM:

As we’ve seen more types of information get syndicated, and as feeds are becoming used for multiple purposes, we’ve been growing concerned about the lack of controls on the distribution of personal data, especially through RSS. For example, you may want to allow your friends and family to subscribe to your blog but you’d prefer your posts not show up in search results.

Along these lines, we recently offered a new way to claim your own feeds and indicate whether you want your feed included or excluded from Blog & Feed search on Ask.com and Bloglines (for more information, read the blog post announcing our Publisher Tools). But this method only solves the issue at Bloglines and Ask.com, and it doesn’t address user-created (as opposed to publisher-created) feeds, like flickr feeds, which can’t be claimed. Clearly, there is a need for an industry-wide solution.

As a result, we are proposing (and have implemented) an RSS and ATOM extension that allows publishers to indicate the distribution restrictions of a feed. Setting the access restriction to ‘deny’ will indicate the feed should not be re-distributed. In Bloglines, we’ll use this to prevent the display of the feed information or posts in search results or any other public venue. If other readers and aggregators use the information in the same way, and publishers of feeds, including services that let users create feeds, implement this standard, we could make significant progress toward making feeds truly safe for non-public information. We think that’s a pretty cool idea.

For technical details and how to participate visit the Bloglines Blog.

Update: Also coverage on Techcrunch

Tags: rss, atom, rss feeds, bloglines

Bloglines has announced some scheduled maintenance coming up on the 2nd August:

Bloglines will be down on Wednesday, August 2nd to upgrade various backend systems. We expect the downtime to start at 9:00PM PDT and last approximately 1 hour.

Tags: bloglines, syndication tools, rss, rss feeds, feedreaders

Bloglines suffered some downtime today according to their blog:

Bloglines suffered an interruption of service between 2:30am PDT and 4:15am PDT today due to critical hardware failure. Necessary services have been moved onto backup machines and there is no impact to accounts, subscriptions, or data. We apologize for this inconvenience and are working to ensure that this does not happen again.

Tags: bloglines, downtime

Bloglines suffered an unplanned outage according to their blog:

Bloglines was unavailable this afternoon for about 30 minutes today, July 27, 2006, starting at 3 PM PDT due to an unplanned power outage. All Bloglines services have returned to normal at the time of this posting.

Tags: bloglines, rss, feeds, syndication