The Bloglines Team: As we continue to develop new features, small and large, we also make necessary improvements to existing systems. Expanding our support for the Atom 1.0 syndication standard is the latest of these. You may notice duplicate posts coming from atom feeds as we make the switch from the old to the new atom parser. But have no fear, these duplicates will fade away and soon be a distant memory.
Attention weblog shoppers: It is now safe to talk about markup in weblogs! I can now say things like <xmp> and é without Bloglines getting confused. Hooray!
This is important to me as quite a few of my readers see my posts through the filter that is Bloglines. Thanks!
Based on a quick sampling, it appears that relative URI references are also handled correctly. Kudos!
Now the true test of a product isn’t how perfect it is — after all, nothing ever quite meets that standard — but how responsive the team is to bug reports and feature requests. Given that there is a brand spanking new Atom parser in Bloglines, hopefully the knowledge of how it is constructed is still fresh, and the following requests should be easy:
Bloglines seems to be missing the <link> elements in my Atom feed. My current theory is that the new Atom parser doesn’t realize that the value of the type attribute defaults to alternate, and attempts to fall back to the atom:id when no alternate link is found.
While markup in content is now safe, it appears that markup in titles is still an issue. Phil created a few tests that you might find helpful. For the benefit of those that believe that this is a rare and isolated issue that only affects a few markup geeks, I will note that the current bloglines feed is not well formed XML and therefore will not be processed by RSSBandit, IE7, or the the Windows RSS Platform.
I’d like to see a third option for the Updated Items preference: only display the item as new if the value of atom:updated changed. Bloggers like Tim Bray use this to distinguish typo corrections from significant updates. In fact, I would argue that this would make a good default for Bloglines as it would generally prevent the user from seeing “imagined” duplicates as the parser improves over time.
While there may be bugs in other corner cases, these are the ones that I see as most likely to affect readers of my weblog.
Thank you for the upgrade, and thanks in advance for your consideration of these requests.
Hurray! Clicking through did not nuke all my other unread items!
Looking at Planet Intertwingly, it appear that atom:titles that appear inside of atom:source elements are being interpreted as the title of the atom:entry. Furthermore, relative URI references inside of Atom content are not consistently resolved correctly.
It does seem likely that fixing one or both of these will create a new wave of duplicates to appear.
Bloglines speaks!: As we continue to develop new features, small and large, we also make necessary improvements to existing systems. Expanding our support for the Atom 1.0 syndication standard is the latest of these. You may notice duplicate posts coming......
[more]
Sam reports that Bloglines has announced they’re now parsing Atom 1.0 feeds. The first thing I’ve done as a result was to unsubscribe from Tim Bray’s RSS feed (which Bloglines forced me to) and subscribe to his Atom feed. Looking......
[more]
your atom feed doesn’t seem to be playing nice with my.yahoo.com’s rss support, empty hrefs for your article links.
Perhaps they have the same bug that Bloglines used to have, i.e., not realizing that the rel attribute has a default (frankly, I don’t know how the spec could have been written much clearer). Merely by reporting it here (the first bullet), and Bloglines was fixed in under 24 hours. Now that is responsive!
Too bad they aren’t responsive to actual user feedback (aka not on a public blog). About 20% of my feeds have not updated at all on Bloglines since they made that post. Including feeds with high subs like the CNET News.com feed or Dilbert comic. You’d think they would want to get something like this fixed ASAP but apparently not.
Bloglines finally do something about their crappy Atom support.
Seeing as they refuse to give proper permalinks on their newslog, I’ve no intention of linking to them, but I’ll happily link to Sam Ruby’s post on it. Kids, throw down your RSS shackles and embrace Atom!...
Perhaps they have the same bug that Bloglines used to have
FWIW, LiveJournal’s syndicated account feed parser has the same bug.
Along the same lines, <comments> with the type attribute left off has always been broken in the Sage extension on Firefox. I fixed my own copy and submitted a patch, but unfortunately it appears getting the coveted “Most Innovative Upgraded Extension award” in the Extend Firefox contest did nothing to get its maintainers progressing on future versions.
but unfortunately it appears getting the coveted “Most Innovative Upgraded Extension award” in the Extend Firefox contest did nothing to get its maintainers progressing on future versions.
Woo-hoo, it’s about time! Now I can desegregate Intertwingly back into my tech folder.
Btw, have you noticed their drag and drop interface for managing subscriptions and folders? It’s nice, and makes me wonder whether that had taken priority over Atom parser improvements.
Sam, this is unrelated, but I’m reminded to mention it every time I post a comment here (apologies if it has already been addressed). How come you forward people to the homepage of your blog after they submit a comment? Redirecting them to the post they just left a comment on is the excepted behavior across most blogging platforms.
Bloglines now has Atom 1.0 support, and though there are some problems there still, it’s time for a new target. I’m sure it’s clear from all my posts that I’m a big proponent of Atom 1.0. However, I probably appeared to be a bit of a hypocrite,...
| My thinking is that once you post a comment, you are done with this entry for a moment.
Speaking for myself, when I’ve commented somewhere I like to see whether my comment actually made it through. Invariably I’ll open up that entry again to double check. I’d say that at least half of the blogs where I’ve commented recently, my posts haven’t survived, so there is some justification for my concern. Not that I’ve had that kind of problem here, but I still like the reassurance of seeing my comment up on the page before I move on to something else.
From Alpha-Geek.com: I was even able to find a blog of one of their workers – Paul’s Journal – though he doesn’t seem to talk about his $job too much. It is hard to post about $job, because very little of Bloglines backend architecture is considered...
Sam Ruby: Forward Motion! Post App A SLASHPD PRODUCTION (/pd): Bloglines - CNN Supports OPML Hans on Experience: Welk protocol kan ik het beste gebruiken voor RSS? interesting survey of his readers...
Nice that they escaped the ampersand in “Duplicates; Real & Imagined” even though they didn’t escape the one in “Blog & Feed Search on tap at Bloglines!” - I’d guess I’ll get to read the post about feed claiming in six months or so, once the latter title falls off the bottom of the feed.
Meantime I’m looking at the “preview page” for the feed in Firefox 2/3, which takes what the parser gave it up until it hit a fatal error, and just displays that much without comment, and wondering what the truly right thing to do is: it’s not an accurate preview of what you’ll get from the draconian Live Bookmarks, but then if you’ve told Firefox you want to subscribe with something slack and forgiving it’s not accurate either.
Bloglines now has Atom 1.0 support, and though there are some problems there still, it’s time for a new target. I’m sure it’s clear from all my posts that I’m a big proponent of Atom 1.0. However, I probably appeared to be a bit of a hypocrite,...