Unsubscribe and resubscribe using the first option (although actually any new subscription should work), which will give you a Feedburner subscription.
Not because of the Feedburner statistics–it’s going to be a long time (if ever) before they’re a meaningful portion of readership–but because you might actually see new posts in a timely manner.
That’s right: The Bloglines problem has recurred, and it ain’t just me.
If you’re wondering whether ACRLog,
Wandering Eyre,
DavidLeeKing,
HangingTogether,
Library Monk,
TametheWeb,
Shifted Librarian
and Walking Paper all took brief blogvacations after last Saturday:
Nope. Every one of those blogs has at least one post today. In an informal scan of Bloglines, not one of them shows an update date more recent than 3/10.
They’re all, as it happens, hosted by LISHost (as am I, and in this case the URL makes it pretty obvious).
This is not a LISHost problem, as far as anyone can tell, except in its consequences: That is, LISHost is not to blame. Blake runs a great hosting service, and I’m pleased to have all three of my web presences hosted here.
Bloglines “works on it,” and for a while everything’s OK (and you see big chunks of posts arrive all at once). Then it keels over again–and it seems to keel over for everything from that server at once.
I still like Bloglines better than Google Reader (mostly for the subscriber count, but there you go). And I believe that some feeds that show up in Bloglines aren’t showing up in Google Reader, but I’m not sure of that. Fortunately, it only takes five minutes to do a quick-scroll through 100+ posts at GR after reading (most of) the posts at Bloglines.
It’s infuriating, to be sure. As of right now, my Feedburner feed has seven Bloglines subscribers. My other feed(s) [excluding comment feeds] have 418. Neither one’s a particularly big number, and W.a.R. is a peculiar little blog, but still…
Walt, I just did as you asked, but the Feedburner feed was the last one in my case…
Hmm. Well, if I set things up right (a huge if), all of the options actually result in the Feedburner feed–but that’s such a big if!
Of course, Bloglines could get the problem resolved (Blake has a pretty good idea what’s happening…)
Walt, the links at the bottom of this very page seem to go directly to your walt.lishost.org feeds rather than feedburner. So you probably need to edit the footer in your WordPress theme.
Could you post a link to the Feedburner feed? For some reason I can’t get it as a result in a search on Bloglines, and if Feedburner itself has a way to search, I haven’t found it yet. I don’t use the Bloglines toolbar, which might account for this. Thanks!
Steve: I think I just fixed that (but I’m no XML expert). Thanks!
Elizabeth: If you’re using IE7 or Firefox 2, the address-bar symbol should yield the Feedburner feed as one (or all) of the choices. Meanwhile, this link should get you there.
Otherwise–well, Blake’s definitely identified what’s causing the Bloglines problem. Maybe Bloglines will get this fixed…
I’m about 99% sure I know what’s going on. To be fair, Bloglines (or at least the one person I’ve been emailing with @Bloglines) has been pretty good about it. Though I did need to tell him 3 times they were hitting one of the LISHosted sites once a minute before they believed me (or that’s how I read it).
The problem comes from 3 things:
1. Spammers
2. Bloglines testing new 3.0
3. My antispam firewall.
If there was no #1 I wouldn’t need #3 and then #2 wouldn’t end up locking Bloglines out of LISHost. I expect we’ll get it all figured our sooner than later. I’m suprised it’s been a problem as long as it has been.
The quick fix right now is I just flush the firewall once a day to be sure they’re picking up things at least once a day. I’m also working on new improved blogspam scripts that will ignore bloglines more effeciently.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/WaltAtRandom
Thanks for the update.
Re: Google Reader and subscriber counts: this may interest you: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/02/one-subscriber-two-subscribers-three.html
Darci, Thanks. I’d actually read that before. It’s not comparable to Bloglines’ count because it’s only available to the blogger (and really only to bloggers who have access to their own log files). What Bloglines does that’s fairly unique is to let anyone see a blog’s subscription count.
I’ve seen some shift to the Feedburner feed–as of now, it’s at 49 where it was around 16, and 29 of the 49 are Bloglines subscriptions. (The count of other subs is only down to 401 from 418, so I guess some people have both or I have a few new subscribers.) Right now, both Bloglines and Google Reader are handling both feeds well, but Feedburner gives me more info anyway.
Wow – I stopped using Bloglines awhile ago because of that very problem. Doesn’t help people read my blog – but it also doesn’t irritate me quite as much, either – posting and then NOT seeing my blog post appear really irks me… and it always appears using Google Reader 🙂