Bloglines Sync-ing Issue...

After a couple of days of back and forth with Sandy Kemsley regarding my FeedBurner feeds not working properly in Bloglines, I’m confident the problem is on the Bloglines end.  As noted in a bunch of web references I Googled-up on the topic.  And since you don’t really want to go through all the troubleshooting Sandy did, I thought I’d make a quick reference here.

One of the behaviors is Bloglines not displaying or catching updates on the feed.  This, amazingly enough, is because in this case their RSS retrieval system stops retrieving info on the feed.  Not a handy feature when you’re an RSS reader.

The other behavior is errant information in the feed.  In my case, I updated my FeedBurner feed to use a different source URL, and when BlogLines was reading the feed, some of the info, like the URL associated with the blahgKarma header displayed for the feed in Bloglines, was incorrect – as it was an artifact from aged info from an earlier incarnation of the feed.

I can only conclude that Bloglines is doing all sorts of caching in their system when it comes to RSS reading, and that its not all working right.  A few of the articles I read indicated they’re good about fixing the problem on a feed-by-feed and user-by-user basis, so we’ll see if they respond and correct the issue.  Maybe one of the triggers for the issue is updating the underlying feed address in a FeedBurner feed (i.e. the address FeedBurner burns from).

Thanks again for the help Sandy.  I’m so glad you didn’t lose any data when you reformatted your hard drive during the testing (grin).