In reply to Scoble’s post today, “Bloglines Sucks“…..
I will first try to outline the “issue”.
At the bottom of every post on a wordpress.com blog, is a tracker image used for statistics. It includes a rand parameter, which changes every time the feed is fetched over HTTP. The image URL is something like this:
http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=scobleizer.com&rand=2045631674&blog=3428&post=3957&subd=scobleizer&ref=&feed=1
Because this rand value changes every time we read the feed, we considered the Item ‘Updated‘.
The behavior of the last 40 posts being shown as updated, every time a new post was added was caused by our use of the HTTP ETags and Last-Modified features. Since Wordpress.com returns a 304 Not Modified for most of our crawls, we would only ‘reparse’ the entire feed when a new post was added.
Now, The reason users do not see this problem in Google Reader, is that Google Reader has no concept of an “Updated” item. When a writer edits a blog post later, users in Google Reader would never see the changes. In Bloglines, we have always considered this a feature, showing you the user when a blog post is edited.
In Bloglines you can disable this feature, on a per-feed basis:
In Bloglines Beta, click on the feed, then select Edit. Change the “Updated Items:” to “Ignore”.
In Bloglines Classic, click on the feed, then select edit subscription. Change the “Updated Items:” to “Ignore”.
As far as I can tell, the use of a rand parameter in the Wordpress.com statistics image is a new change, also introduced at the same time the inline comment images were added to feeds.
FeedBurner includes similar statistics, tracking images and comment images, but they do not include a constantly changing image url. This works correctly in Bloglines.
In regards to placing blame, Dana Epp says “Bloglines says it’s not them”. I don’t know who Dana has talked to inside Bloglines. When these type of issues are reported, we generally try to get in touch and investigate with the publisher, and hopefully figure out what is going on together, rather than outright saying its not our fault. It is a bad experience for our users, and we always want to be involved and help fix it.
I first heard about this issue on Friday, December 21st from Matt via email. (also my birthday) I forwarded that email onto our internal Bloglines Engineering Mailing list, but frankly, I didn’t expect anyone to work on the issue on the Friday before Christmas. IAC Search and Media, the parent company of Bloglines and Ask.com, also has a mandatory Holiday Shutdown this week for all employees. No one will be in the office officially until January 2nd, 2008.
Luckily or unlucky, depending on your perspective, I took some time this afternoon away from my family to read my feeds. For now the bug^H^H^Hfeature in Bloglines of showing edited posts has been fixed. I’ve have simply turned it off for all users.
I hope you had a Merry Christmas, and have a Happy New Year.
Hey Paul,
Thanks for the interm fix! Appreciate the efforts. Have a Happy New Year!
[...] doesn’t suck Here’s Bloglines reply about the issue with my feed. Nice to see this taken care of, thanks. I mean that sincerely. Filed under: scoble @ 1:58 am [...]
It is possible to implement a metric that’ll detect significant change but ignore trivia like this, based on markup analysis. I did some work on such metrics in the context of Site Valet and the W3C Evaluation and Repair working group, to detect whether a change to a page may invalidate a piece of independent metadata about the page, such as the reports generated by Site Valet.
Ping me if you’d like me to look for pointers to this stuff!
So, let me try to get this straight – Robert Scoble cries foul and “sucks” over a feature which many of your users love (and which brings many of your users to Bloglines instead of, say, Google Reader), in utter ignorance of the reasons and facts, and you remove said feature for everyone?
What precisely makes Robert Scoble a better gauge of Bloglines’ features than, say, the people using it? He isn’t a user. He just potentially, hearsay-y, loses readers, I (and the x-thousand other users) lose a feature.
Thanks for looking into this and posting a fix, Paul. It is very much appreciated.
you know, this feature actually drove me to stop using bloglines after many months of frustration. yes, I could have looked into it more, but I’m just lazy I guess.
Paul,
thanks for responding to Robert’s post. I’m also a subscriber of his, and it was really annoying to keep on seeing his last 50 feeds.
Anyways, I was wondering if you guys follow up on forum threads. I posted in the forums about an issue about an issue I have with Bloglines and how it displays my feed. No one from Bloglines has yet to respond.
(In short, links and images don’t show up in my feed)
I have more than 450 subscribers on Bloglines, it’s a shame that they can’t see my feed in its correct format.
Paul, I hope you could either take a look at it yourself or pass it along to the appropriate person at Bloglines.
Thanks,
Daniel
We’re sorry about that. The rand value is not needed and we removed it today.
[...] posts is hard. Google doesn’t do it. Bloglines beta used to partially do it (but they turned it off). But I want Assetbar to fully support versioning. It can make you want to hit your head against [...]
I might be being thick, but I thought individual feed items included metadata indicating when they were last updated themselves—or is this so unreliable as to be useless?
Wow. So you do sometimes respond to complaints. I’ve been sending emails to bloglines for nearly two weeks now trying to resolve an issue where my feed has been dumped adn I’ve lost 104 subscribers, and not only has nothing been fixed, I haven’t even received a reply to my messages.
It is possible to implement a metric that’ll detect significant change but ignore trivia like this, based on markup analysis. I did some work on such metrics in the context of Site Valet and the W3C Evaluation and Repair working group, to detect whether a change to a page may invalidate a piece of independent metadata about the page, such as the reports generated by Site Valet.
I might be being thick, but I thought individual feed items included metadata indicating….
Thanks for the interm fix! Appreciate the efforts. Have a Happy New Year! 2010