Comments on: Late Bloglines notifications: You’re not alone

By: walt

walt — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:01:21 +0000

Mark, no apology required. The post itself was sloppily written early in the morning — well, not THAT early, but — and easy enough to misinterpret.

Another datum: The revised post showed up in Bloglines within an hour after posting.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 21:13:35 +0000

Sorry about the misinterpretation, Walt. That’s what happens when I’m up at 3:30, I guess.

By: Angel

Angel — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 18:00:36 +0000

Seems indeed you are not the only one. I have noticed it as well, not to mention the fact that once in a while I get some blog suddenly showing with 20 or more posts in a shot, only to see they are all old posts I saw already. So it either fails to update, or it repeats old stuff. I like Bloglines features, and I have a lot of stuff saved in clippings, but I am seriously considering a switch if I find something good. It may be free, but it does not mean the annoyance factor is worth it, and I am starting to get annoyed. Best, and keep on blogging.

By: walt

walt — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:33:21 +0000

Mark, Actually, I thought I was saying that the # of subscribers *seemed* like a good theory, but couldn’t be right, for exactly the reasons you cite: I have enough subscribers that I should be getting reasonably rapid polling.

Oddly enough, I got the post above at 5:50 a.m. this morning, according to Bloglines’ time stamp–roughly an hour after you did, and two days after the post. That’s better than 4 or 6 days.

I just checked Urchin [statistics] for the past week. Of the four feeds (at least one of which is just comments), the number of subscribers and number of Bloglines hits over the week was:

1. 192 subscribers, 15 hits. [Seems like a low frequency.]
2. 191 subscribers, 41 hits. [Six a day: That sounds plausible.]
3. 4 subscribers, 42 hits [Probably the comments feed]
4. 33 subscribers, 76 hits [11/day, way more than enough]

“Feedfetcher-Google” had 433 hits for the week. Feedster had 54 (I don’t have a Feedster account setup). One bot was in the low thousands… (Oh, and sessions, which presumably doesn’t include bots, averaged about 1350/day for the week.)

I don’t know what to make of all this. I added a note on the Bloglines feedback forum, but I don’t have any sense that anyone from Bloglines is monitoring or responding to those “feedback” forums–so far, it looks like a place for disgruntled users to vent to one another.

I know, I know: The price is right. And I could always switch (I keep KeepNews down to a dozen or fewer, because I keep stuff I want to use later in paper form…I know, that’s terribly luddite, but…)

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 13:05:40 +0000

It was me, or me and…. This one just showed up on Monday at 6 AM-ish Central. I say that confidently because I was up at 3:30 unfortunately.

Jennifer, it has been on and off for a couple months now. And it was worse–or so it seemed–a couple months back. And I can generally live with it for most feeds, but I consider this one of the most valuable feeds I subscribe to.

Walt, I think your theory about # of subscribers is flawed. I often get my posts in Bloglines before I can even get from posting to logging into Bloglines. Or at most, usually within about 5 minutes, and you have far more subs in Bloglines than I do (407 vs 59 if my math is right).

I find it sort of ironic to see this now, as I was just heading off to write a post and ask for suggestions for another web-based aggregator. I doubt I’ll switch either, though, as I have over 4700 items marked Keep New and I don’t think it is possible to stop a feed AND keep the things already marked in Bloglines. That would’ve been the 2nd part of my question.

And, yes, I know I need to weed that stuff out. I have been trying, but it takes time. Not something I have a lot of.

By: Diane

Diane — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 22:51:24 +0000

I have to admit your post made me curious so I went through my bloglines account list and took a quick look at the “updated” information on several blogs. Color me surprised to notice there were several who had posted over the weekend and the feed did not make it to my list. I like Bloglines and am hesitant to move away too quickly (though it wouldn’t kill me to try another reader…).

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 02:03:59 +0000

Walt, I first noticed this problem in Bloglines in October. I initially noticed that my new blog posts were not showing up in a timely manner. After a while, I started going through most blogs that I subscribed to manually. In all honesty, it seems to be completely random – and at this point, has happened to every blog to which I subscribe at some point in time regardless of popularity. Recently, it has been taking 3-5 days for your posts to show up. I have been using other aggregators of late (but I still keep checking in Bloglines too). I guess the reason that I find it so frustrating is that I can’t figure out why it is happening or any pattern for it.