Maybe Google’s Blogger shouldn’t have come out of beta just yet…
I’ve noticed over the last week or so that some of the Blogger-hosted blogs that I subscribe to via Bloglines have disappeared. I did a test post over on my Blogger account that I never use. Chris also mentioned something about this today.
Blogger’s been encouraging people to switch over and use their Google accounts as a login and switch to the new and improved Blogger. That’s all well and good, but it seems that something’s not quite right with the RSS feeds.
First off, it sucks that RSS feeds can’t be automatically redirected. I’m pretty sure that there are ways to do this, but Blogger doesn’t seem too worried about helping with it.
Up until recently, I’ve subscribed to the RSS feeds of Blogger-hosted blogs at http://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?bsuser=blogname. In fact, Bloglines even gives you a shortcut in their add subscription interface under the Communities section that allows you just to enter the Blogger username of the blog and they do the rest. The problem is that this shortcut still points to the old feeds. The new format seems to be http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default. Hitting that URL directly returns the RSS XML. If you try to subscribe to that URL in Bloglines, it lets you add the subscription, but you don’t get any new updates. Adding the new RSS URLs in Google Reader works just fine, not surprising, since Google obviously owns the reader and they own Blogger.
I sent an e-mail to Bloglines asking about the problem. I’m not sure that there’s anything to be done from Blogger’s end, but we’ll see. I’ll update if I hear something. I can’t be the only one having this problem.
If they don’t get it fixed soon, it could shove me into Google Reader’s waiting arms. I tried them a few months ago and decided to stay with Bloglines. It might be time for another look. Coincidentally, Lifehacker has an article touting Google Reader today.
[tags]blogger, bloglines, rss, feeds, googlereader, google[/tags]