Hey Blogliners, I fixed your feeds. I think. 0 comments Added on 08/25/07 by
Kris
My apologies as this turned into a mild nerd rant. Thanks to the Bloglines users who dropped me a line to let me know about this.
Dear Bloglines Users and Bloglines Employees,
I have now hacked all of my feeds to work properly in Bloglines. Bloglines users saw this problem begin about two months ago now, but I finally thought of a good way to make this happen with the minimal amount of work. That's not to say that it wasn't a pain to update all the feeds and create all new ones.
For those of you that still experience constant updates of the feeds even after you have read an item PLEASE SEND ME THE FEED URL and I will fix it ASAP. I know you got to get your Croncast! :-)
For the record, I want to state that this problem is not a Croncast feeds problem, but a Bloglines problem.
It started when I added dynamic ads to the feeds. Dynamic in this sense that odds are nearly 100 percent that the ad will be new every time the feed is loaded. This is way bad for Bloglines. They ignore the post's time stamp (part of the RSS spec to let aggregators know that an item is new or has been updated) in favor of updating user accounts when the post copy has been modified. Say for example a new ad in an old post. So every 30 minutes or so when Bloglines would come and get the feed content on behalf of a user and there was a new ad . . . poof, our subscribers would get an update that there was a new item in the feed. Uh, no. Same post new ad.
Why not just go with the time stamp? Got me. Not using the time stamp seems silly. Maybe they think they are doing publishers a favor by updating the content in a feed in case there is a spelling error that gets fixed or you fired up the thesaurus to come off like a smarty pants.
Whatever the reason is - they should stop doing it and simply notify their users when an item has a new time stamp like the rest of the feed readers on the planet. This way I could run ads in feeds that help me cover my server costs and not create special 'bloglines only' feeds.
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