Bloglines oddity

I’ve been annoyed for a while by a strange situation with my blogroll. I maintain this using BlogLines because it combines the ability to keep a record of blogs I want to link to (a blogroll for my blog) with aggregating and managing the feeds themselves (so that I can keep up with lots of blogs without having to visit every site daily just to check whether a new post has appeared). All is well and good.

Except that I got an odd result for my own blog. I subscribe to my own blog not for narcissism but to see how many other people subscribe to it (OK, still a little narcissistic). The oddity was that, when I looked at my listing, I saw five subscribers. However, when Anne looked at my listing, she saw 13 subscribers! This was bugging me and bugging me, until I finally reported it as a bug to the BlogLines people. They quickly got back and suggested that it was due to our subscribing to different feeds. And indeed it was so – I had chosen the Atom feed and Anne had chosen the RSS feed.

So, a warning to those using BlogLines (or any other aggregator, I’d guess) – if you publish feeds in multiple formats and want to see how many subscribers you’ve got, don’t forget to check each feed individually! I have suggested that they pool the subscriber lists for all feeds to a given blog, but who knows when that might appear…

pax et bonum

Article posted at 10:28pm on 24 April 2006
Category: Computers, Struggling, General