I’ve been trying to claim my blogs on Bloglines through their publisher tools. I think I’m up to quite a few blogs now (6? too lazy to count), so it takes awhile to put all the claim codes and what not into my webpages and blog posts. This was fairly easy to do when I claimed my blogs on Technorati, but Bloglines is retarded about this.

I have to insert 2 codes, one into my blog, and one into my post. Then, Bloglines verifies that both codes exist when viewed through the browser, but only the post code exists when the RSS feed is viewed. This is not that bad, although it’s more than twice the effort of other services (i.e. have to generate or refresh the RSS feed — particularly since I’m using Feedburner on some blogs).

The huge, huge problem is that their codes are surrounded in HTML comments (<!– –>). When RSS feeds are created, some services conveniently strip these comments from the text (you can’t read them in a feed reader anyways, so why waste bandwidth on it). This means you can’t claim blogs that use these services! Now, these must be very uncommon services right? Of course, they’re simply WordPress (one of the most popular blogging systems) and Feedburner (the best RSS feed provider).

OK, to give Bloglines some credit, they do provide streamlined claiming procedures for Blogger and LiveJournal. I don’t use LJ so I tried the Blogger one. It’s pretty easy, you type in your blog name and then give it your login information. That’s the same way Flickr does things. Slight problem — Bloglines won’t authenticate you properly even if your login information is correct.

So, I am frustrated by Bloglines, it used to be a good feed reader, but I don’t use it anymore because the interface isn’t that hot (and I use a non-browser based reader). The new publisher tools should be labelled Beta, although even then they are significantly buggier than other Betas around the interweb.

Sidenote: I’m attempting to link the Publisher Tools news post, but you know their permalink doesn’t work.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: blogging, dumb, rant, webwork