Brave Tech World

October 24, 2006

    I should start getting paid by BlogLines since I write so much about them. The problem is that with all the Web 2.0 services that I use the one that I use the most is BlogLines and I can't live without it. I tried the new Google Reader, but again it didn't do what I wanted.

    This time my issue with BlogLines is its utterly incompatibility with MSN Spaces (or Microsoft Windows Live Spaces Blog and Social Networking Service, for those that like the official name).

    Of the 160 feeds that I subscribe to, only two are from MSN Spaces for two friends of mine (Oliver and Flavia). Oliver's last post is about 2 or 3 months old, but everyday, Bloglines tells me that Oliver has 35 new posts. Everyday for the last 2 weeks!!! For Flavia, Bloglines sometimes tells me there are 6 new posts, sometimes 12 new posts, sometimes other number. And the last post on Flavia's blog is about 2 weeks old.

    When MSN Spaces launched, Oliver (he was a PM a MSN at the time) wrote a blog post on how BlogLines was using the wrong method to detect if something had changed on a blog post (that was on May 2005!). They are computing the hash of the body of the post. The problem with that is MSN Spaces changes the address of pictures every so often. So, Bloglines thinks there was an update.

    Now, I looked at MSN Spaces and they are correctly using the dc:Modified element to indicate when the item was last updated. Why can't Bloglines just use that information instead of trying to be "clever"?

Comments (1) for "BlogLines and MSN Spaces don...

Oh yeah, BlogLines is cool but has its quirks; it often losses all the entries I selected for saving in a given feed, and sometimes it just remembers the wrong entries. And then there's the problem with MySpaces too. One thing I do and helps is to change the subscription to ignore updated items (edit subscription -> updated items -> ignore). By Thales - 10/26/2006 7:44 AM